A Shadow on the Glass (70 page)

Suddenly the link she had forged between them in Shazmak was alive again and a deluge poured across. A night mare of faces: the face of Vartila; the face of Idlis; the face of Yggur; another face. Llian half-woke, remembering the dream he had had in Tullin, long ago. It was the same face that he’d dreamed about at the campsite. That figure, dwarfing its stone chair, flinging off its chains, reaching out.

Rulke! How had he not realized? Rulke! But why did she dream of
him
? Abruptly, Llian sprang from his half-sleep back into her dream.

Yggur he saw then, and Tensor. Llian even saw himself—the faces spinning, twisting, now blending into one another, now stark, alone. He saw again the Nightland, that intangible prison made to contain Rulke. He saw Rulke in it too, only this time he was not chained in that stone seat—he was working in a vast chamber, putting what appeared to be the final touches to a construct, an engine of unhuman proportions but unmistakable potential. This time Rulke did not look up, though he knew they had seen him, for he had drawn their gaze to him. Somehow this was more frightening than before.

Karan whimpered. The dream changed and Llian was looking up at the face of Emmant. He experienced once more the terror that he had felt before in Shazmak, until he realized, with the slow separation of his memory and Karan’s dream, that
she
was the one Emmant gloated over, and that it was
him
she feared the most. He reached out, and Llian saw again the brutal, murderous lust of the outcast whom she had spurned and humiliated.

Karan screamed, the nightmarish yellowed sound of one driven to the brink of madness. Then with an awful laugh she wrenched herself free of Llian’s arms and flung herself into the sea.

For a moment she was visible in the trough of the wave behind them, the moonlight shining on her pale face. Llian stood up at once, unbalancing the boat so that the next wave nearly swamped them. He scrabbled around for a line but couldn’t find one, just stood looking despairingly after her as the distance grew swiftly.

Pender had reacted at once, heaving on the steering oar, spilling the wind from the sail, hauling the sail down, but still they drifted away. Llian was hopping up and down, screaming at Karan, the boat rocking dangerously. Pender grew suddenly angry, swung his hooked arm at Llian’s midriff and with surprising ease knocked him over the side.

“A more worthless fool I’ve never met,” he muttered, then shouted, “That way!” as Llian’s head emerged from the water, his eyes like saucers.

Llian struck out strongly in the direction that Pender pointed, the waves lifting him and letting him fall again, though only occasionally did he catch a glimpse of her, lying unmoving in the water. When he reached the place where he had seen her last she was not there and he had to stand as high as he could in the sea, treading water furiously, before he found her nearby. She was pale and cold as death, though
when he put his hand on her throat a faint pulse still ticked there.

Llian turned her on her back, holding her shoulders until she was upright in the water. She sank down to her chin, kept sinking, and he wrapped his arms around her back and squeezed her against his chest. Water rushed out of her mouth and nose, warm water ran down his back. Tucking her chin over his shoulder he squeezed again and again. More water rushed out, then he felt her take a shuddering, gurgling breath and she vomited over his shoulder into the water.

He scooped water and washed her face with it. Her head lolled in his hands, her eyes opened and closed again. Llian pushed her head back on his shoulder, holding her tightly, then looked around for the boat. It was nowhere to be seen.

He kicked himself higher in the water but there was no sign of the boat in the darkness. It was too tiring, holding them both so high, and he sank back down. A wave broke in his face; he wiped the water awkwardly from his eyes. What a fool I am, he thought miserably. Even Pender has more presence of mind. If it wasn’t for him …

But where is he? In the darkness Pender might never find them. He might just abandon them. Llian searched for the shoreline, but he was no longer certain which direction to look. Even if he had known the direction, he was too low to have seen it, this far away, in the dark. The water was so cold that the feeling was already going from his feet. It would not take long to die.

L
lian kept himself and Karan afloat for what seemed like hours, though it was not really long at all. There was just a little spark of warmth between them where they touched, and cold water everywhere else. Then the oars rattled and the skiff appeared suddenly from upwind, gliding toward them under Pender’s expert hand so close that Llian had only to reach up and grasp the side. Pender shipped the oars, heaved Karan into the boat, then Llian. He wrapped them both in a piece of canvas, though the wind still chilled them.

“She needs fire and a hot drink,” said Pender. “We go ashore.”

Llian huddled in the wrapping and looked at Pender’s fat, ugly face with a great deal of respect.

A little way down the coast they found a tiny beach between two rocky headlands. Thick forest covered the land behind the beach; there was heath on the headlands. The
north end of the beach was sheltered from the waves and there, just at the end of the rock platform, Pender drove the skiff onto the sand. They lit two large fires and put Karan between them, feeding her with thin soup and sweet tea. After that she slept, but the nightmares came again. Twice she ran away into the night. The second time they found her poised at the edge of a low cliff, and this time they took her back and bound her.

In the morning she seemed better, though she was weak. The wind had swung around to the south, offering hope of a faster passage. They set sail straight as an arrow for Thurkad.

Dawn came, the eighth since they had fled Sith, and the whole of the western sky was covered in a pall of smoke as the skiff rounded the cliffed headland and passed into the deep protected waters of Port Cardasson, the finest harbor in all Meldorin, the harbor of the most ancient city of Thurkad. The port was thick with vessels: from the huge ships, festooned with yellow sail, that came all the way from Crandor, laden with spices and silken cloth, jewelry and precious woods, to the tiny
kules
, with their single triangular rig, that fished the estuaries for jellyfish. Tree-covered ridges ran down to enclose a myriad of narrow, deep inlets. The harbor was dotted with tiny islands, some bearing slender light-towers to mark the channel.

The channel took a dog-leg to the left. Half a league away, partly hidden by a trio of rocky islands, was the city, a multicolored smudge against the rugged hills that squeezed it into the water. They passed between the islands, turned west again and crossed from the deep blue water of Port Cardasson into the shallow muddy expanse of Thurkad Cove.

Llian gaped. “In all my travels I’ve never seen such a city. They must have cut down a forest to build it.”

“Nor smelt one, eh!” said Pender, covering his nose. The wind from the north carried an intense odor of rotting fish, and other things besides.

Karan, who seemed almost back to normal today, said, “It has always been an unhappy place for me.”

Thurkad was not the greatest city in Meldorin, but it was by far the oldest, an old city even by the time of Shuthdar. The shore was covered in a vast concretion of wharves, warehouses and jetties that were built out over the water on mighty piles, blackened and tarry, three and four and even five storeys high. The structures extended out into the water for as much as a thousand paces, and ran the best part of a league around the cove. Some parts were upright, some leaning, and some had floors tilted and awash; braced cross-ways with beams the size of tree trunks or bound with black iron bands. The whole great structure was slowly subsiding into the mud and peat, yet each part had its precariously perched higher storeys. This was the wharf city of the Hlune, the robed folk who controlled all seaborne commerce n and out of Thurkad.

“The sea rises,” said Karan, “and the land subsides. They forever build on top of the old. The ancient part of the city s like an iceberg; most of it now lies below the water.”

The bay was busy with water traffic—rafts of logs brought down the River Saboth all the way from the mountains; barges bearing sacks of grain, barrels of salted fish, pickled vegetables, wine or oil; ferries running to the villages on the south side of the port and the roads beyond. They skipped in and out of the streaming traffic and drew up to a massive wharf platform. The water had an oily gleam. Patches of yellow scum clung to the piles.

They climbed a series of ladders built for giants and
stood on the black decking. The wharf city was vast and in ruinous condition—warped, rotting and pocked with jagged holes where part of the understructure had collapsed. Some of these voids were partly covered with loose planking but the majority yawned open, a trap for anyone who walked inattentively.

Pender found an official, paid the handover fee and checked the receipt carefully. Without it his boat would have disappeared in a moment.

Karan hesitated at the edge of the wharf until Llian, who was walking slightly ahead, came back and took her hand. Halfway across they passed by one of the holes in the deck, a long, narrow tear like a crevasse, evidently where one of the foundation piles had rotted away and carried everything with it. Within the crater the maze of crazily tilted timber made a honeycomb of black, slimy cells. The sullen water could be seen far below, and a stale odor of seaweed and decay drifted up.

A movement caught Llian’s eye, then another. A thin, grimy face was staring up at him. Lots of faces. There were people living down there, crawling along beams, hauling on green ropes that trailed down into the water. He pointed them out to Karan.

“There are too many people here, and not enough land,” she responded with a shudder. “No space is wasted. Let us get out of this damnable place; it gives me nightmares to feel it beneath me.”

Karan shouldered her pack and hurried toward the western hills and the towers of the old city. At last they reached the shore, stepping off the age-stained deck onto the steep streets. They were narrow and paved with bricks of dark blue, flecked with black. The buildings were grimy stone. They settled themselves in one of the many inns that lined
the edge of the wharf. Pender saw them to their door and disappeared.

Karan called for tea and, after it came, sat down on the floor in front of Llian.

“We should not have come here,” she said, pouring the tea from a brazen urn with a compartment at the base containing heated stones.

‘There was nowhere else to go.”

“We haven’t left my enemies behind; we’ve caught up to them.”

“Who then? Who are you afraid of? Is it Mendark?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I’m afraid to use my talent.” She looked around her as though the walls were closing in.

Llian inspected his tea. It was rich red in the white bowl, but with globules of liquid butter on the surface which he spooned out carefully. It wasn’t that he minded butter in the tea; many places in the north had that custom. This butter was more gray than yellow though, and it smelled rancid.

Karan clasped her hands around her bowl and put her head down so that the steam drifted over her face. The fragrant vapor seemed to give her some heart.

“It seems I must rely on your
friend
, Mendark. You’d better go and fetch him.”

The melancholy and submissiveness in her voice grieved Llian. “I wouldn’t call him a friend,” he said. He was almost as apprehensive as she was about the meeting. “All right, I’ll go. Will you be safe here?”

“I’ll bar the door and sleep,” she said. “Go. Hurry!”

It was after noon when he emerged on the street below. The wind carried the stench of the wharves to him. He looked around. A narrow promenade, cluttered with the tables of many outdoor cafe’s, stretched along the wharfside. Uphill the streets of the city formed a maze in all directions.
But Mendark was Magister; anyone would know where the Magister dwelt.

The first two people he spoke to brushed by without answering, but the third, an urchin of the streets, a grubby, thin child who looked about nine or ten, with scabs on both her knees, directed him to the citadel. The few coppers he put in her tiny hand were evidently a vast overpayment, for she gave him the most beaming white smile, looked around to be sure that no one was watching—no one was, as far as Llian could tell—palmed the fortune and skipped away. The citadel was a complex of towers on the hill above. Llian had noted them earlier from the boat.

He took a street that seemed to wander in the right direction, but in the labyrinthine alleys and roofed passages of the old city he continually lost his way. Once or twice he had noticed the child behind him. Now, just when he decided to hire her to be his guide, she was no longer there.

The gates of the citadel turned out to be almost an hour away. They stood open but four guards, arrayed in scarlet and blue, belts and boots shining, stood in a slanting spray of sunlight at the entrance. They moved to bar his way with their pikes.

“What is your business in the citadel, ruffian?” asked the foremost, and Llian wished he’d had the foresight to buy clean clothes, to wash, to shave.

He caught the gaze of the fellow and said determinedly, “I am Llian of Chanthed. I bear a message from Wistan, Master of Chanthed, to Mendark, Magister of the High Council of Thurkad. I beg admittance at once.”