Havenstar (30 page)

‘Any sign
of—of whatever it was?’ she asked him, but her eyes were on the
blood-drenched bird.

He shook his
head. ‘It left a trail of ichor. I think both our arrows are still
in it. We followed the trail to the stockade fence, but no further.
None of us had the stomach for going out there, not tonight. I
don’t think it will trouble us again.’

‘Nor at all, I
imagine,’ Meldor said calmly. ‘Not wounded and with its master
dead. Why the—er—chicken, Davron?’

The Chameleon
and Keris exchanged glances. Useless to wonder just how Meldor knew
the guide was carrying anything at all.

‘Touch it,’
Davron suggested, and held it out.

Meldor reached
out and rested his fingers on the feathers of the bird’s back for a
moment. ‘Ah. A worship sacrifice. It’s been dead for several hours,
I think.’

‘A what?’ the
Chameleon asked.

She tried to
look at Quirk. His voice came out of nowhere; in the dim light of
the hall, he kept fading away into the background,
indistinguishable from the treads of the stairs and the hand-hewn
walls of the halt where the bark still clung to the planks in
leprous patches.

Meldor wiped
his hands on his kerchief. ‘The only way for a Minion to contact
his lord while not in a ley line is for him to perform a rather
nasty ritual of worship that must involve a slow death by bleeding.
I’m surprised Graval was content with a hen. Bigger prey offer a
stronger contact. We are lucky he didn’t decide to use one of our
horses, or even a man.’

‘Reasons of
stealth, I imagine,’ Davron said. ‘He wasn’t intending to go mad
and be killed. He wanted to continue his spying on us.’ Pickle
appeared in the doorway and Davron handed the chicken to him. ‘You
may as well cook it.’

‘One of my
best layers,’ Pickle said morosely. ‘Do you know how hard it is to
keep a chicken untainted in this place?’

‘From now on,
Pick,’ Davron said, carefully avoiding looking Keris’s way as he
spoke, ‘I want you to tell every single guide that comes through
here they’d better check their fellowships for the presence of
Minions, before they leave the stabs. Suggest they ask their
fellowship to strip to the waist. All Minions carry the chain and
sigils of Carasma.’

‘Oh, the women
in the fellowships will love that,’ said Quirk. ‘Are you going to
ask Corrian to take off her clothes tomorrow, Master Davron?’

Davron winced
at the thought and Pickle laughed. ‘Somehow I think enough people
have checked Corrian out without Davron having to resort to
that.’

‘Let’s go to
bed,’ said Meldor. He appeared suddenly saddened, and the touch of
distress aged him.

They climbed
the stairs together, in silence, Meldor and the Chameleon ahead,
Davron and Keris behind. There were a few scattered goodnights at
the top and they went off into their respective rooms. Or so she
thought, until she stepped into her room and realised Davron was
right behind her. She could not help flinching away.

If he saw her
reaction, he ignored it. ‘We left our wine,’ he said by way of
explanation. He picked up the wine skin, and her mug. He topped it
up from the skin and handed it to her. ‘Drink this. You have need
of it.’

She took the
mug with fingers that trembled.

He filled his
own mug. ‘Keris,’ he said gently, ‘don’t lose any sleep over it.
You did the right thing at the right time, and there are a number
of people who can be grateful to you tonight.’

She blinked,
wondering at his understanding, staggered that—of all of them—he
was the only one to know how she felt. To know how scarified she’d
been by the sight of her knife in a man’s throat, the blood
gushing, the light snuffed out, the life gone...

‘I remember,’
he said, and he had quelled the harshness in his voice, ‘what it
was like the first time.’ He spoke almost absently as if he’d
forgotten she was there. He was looking beyond her, into some place
in the past which was beyond her knowledge, yet now within her
understanding. ‘I was out on one of my first patrols with the
Defenders. I was just a kid, but then—so was he. He was an Unbred
who had somehow escaped the rule-chantors. He’d had fourteen years
or so of life in the stability, life that he should never have had
at all ... but that didn’t make his death any easier for me.’

‘He was
deformed?’

He nodded. ‘A
crippled arm and leg at birth. Hidden by his parents on their farm,
until the Rule Office found out about him. He was a bit too old for
them to smother by then, but still an affront to their ordered
souls. They were surprisingly magnanimous.’ He snorted. ‘They
commanded us to take the lad and abandon him in the Unstable. He
didn’t want to go, naturally enough. We talked, and I felt sorry
for him. Then he jumped me on guard duty one night. I didn’t mean
to kill him, but that’s what ended up happening. Considering his
disability, he was surprisingly strong.’

He paused,
sipping his wine absent-mindedly and she waited for him to
continue.

‘I assume he
wanted to die rather than face exclusion,’ he said at last. He
looked at her then, and she saw to her surprise that he had tears
in his eyes. ‘It was a long time ago ... but I can’t forget. He may
have wanted to die, but I lost something that night. I never felt
young again. The first time ... is difficult. And perhaps even
worse than that, is the fact that it gets easier. It shouldn’t.
Killing someone should never be easy.’

She nodded,
unable to trust herself to speak.

‘Graval, at
least, had forfeited his right to life. Don’t let it touch you too
much. He wasn’t worth it.’ He waved his wine skin at her still
untouched glass. ‘I’m—I’m sorry you’ve had such a bad journey on
your first trip into the Unstable. It happens that way sometimes.
Anyway, drink your wine and go to bed.’

She nodded.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘Davron.’ No title, just his name.

He went to the
door and stood there, looking at her, sharing his pain,
understanding her own. And then he was gone.

She closed the
door and picked up Piers’ staff. She hugged it to her, missing her
father, wanting her mother. Wanting Davron. By all Creation’s
ordering, what sort of man was he? How could he ride the Unstable
with all the stolidity of a donkey pulling a millstone around in an
endless circle, knowing what was in his future? What kind of man
could hold on to his sanity knowing one day he would do the
Unmaker’s bidding—yet who could be sensitive enough to know how she
had felt at Graval’s death?

She drank the
wine as if it was water and wished she had more.

She dreamed of
Davron that night. It was a dream disturbing enough to wake her,
and it left her filled with uncomfortable feelings she could not
pin down and with the odd sensation that her skin was too small for
her body. Her insides seemed compressed, spiralled too tight, in
need of release. Even her nipples swelled against her
night-dress.

Rolling over,
she lay flat on her back with her hands locked behind her head. She
knew what it was she felt. She had Sheyli’s frankness to thank for
that, but she didn’t welcome the sensations, not when they came
accompanied by dreams of Davron Storre. Sheyli might have been
explicitly frank when she spoke of the physical manifestations of
desire, but no one had ever explained to her how it was possible to
want a man who had done something as despicable as to give his
promise of servitude to the Unmaker. A man who may one day have to
kill her, if that was what he was ordered to do.

She shivered
and waited for the dawn.

~~~~~~~

Keris was late
into the common room for breakfast. She’d not slept well and both
her body and mind felt leaden. She was glad of the strong brew of
char the waitress served up, but was less attracted by the griddle
cakes and honey that came with it. And still less happy when she
overheard snatches of conversation from a group of several tainted
men at a nearby table. One had a mouse-like head, another fangs and
slit-eyes, and a third a face so flat that the nostrils were only
holes without a nose.

‘I tell you,’
the mouse was saying, ‘there are dragons. Or something similar.
Flying creatures that eat chantists and let the tainted pass.’

‘No, Havenstar
can’t be like that!’ the fanged man protested. ‘My friend has been
there. He wouldn’t say much, but he did say—’

Keris missed
the next bit, and heard only the flat-faced man laugh and observe
that he rather preferred the idea of dragons that ate
chantists.

The next few
words she heard clearly came from the mouse. ‘—not making it up. It
was possible to fly in their embrace. Imagine that—fly!’

She lost the
rest of the conversation, because Meldor made his way unerringly
across the room towards her and slipped into the empty chair at her
table.

‘Greetings,’
he said. ‘I’m glad to find you. We never did get to finish our
conversation about maps yesterday.’

‘I have
nothing to add to what was said,’ she replied, raising her voice a
little to be heard over a volley of hammering that came from
outside. Pickle’s employees had evidently been set to reinforcing
the halt’s defences. ‘Meldor, are you a Trician too?’

There was a
momentary pause before he asked: ‘Too?’

‘Davron told
me last night he was once a Defender, and that means Trician to
me.’

‘Ah. Yes, he
was, once. He forfeited that right when he became an Unstabler, of
course. Before that, he belonged to a minor domain house of the
Fourth Stab. He was Davron of Storre then. Nobody of any particular
importance in the Trician hierarchy.’

‘And you?’ she
persisted.

He shook his
head. ‘What makes you think I’m Trician?’

She shrugged.
‘A certain—assurance. A quality of leadership. An unconscious
assumption you seem to make that you will be obeyed. And your
accent.’

‘No. Those
things, if I do indeed have them, didn’t come from a Trician
background. I was born, as far as I know, the son of a wheelwright
somewhere or other. I never knew either of my parents, and was
never even told which stab they were from. I was a third son and as
a consequence I was given over to Chantry immediately after birth.
As you doubtless know, too big a family is considered inimical to
Order.’

She nodded.
Everyone tried to limit family size, using one method or another,
but accidents happened often enough and Rule-chantors were ruthless
in ferreting out additions to families that had already reached
optimum numbers. She made a gesture of distress, remembering her
little brother Aurin.

‘A wheelwright
has need of only one son to maintain the business,’ he continued,
‘whereas Chantry can never have too many chantors. Especially since
so many lose their lives serving fellowships during crossings.’ His
voice was so deliberately toneless, she could not tell what his
feelings were. ‘I was wet-nursed by a chantora breeder in Dene.
That’s in the Seventh. Later I was sent for Chantry training in
Salient.’

She almost
dropped her cup. ‘You were a chantor?’

‘Is that so
hard to believe?’

‘Yes. Somehow
it is.’ She’d thought him too much an individual, too independent,
to have ever submitted to the regimen of a religious life.

‘I was not
given any choice in the matter at the time. Now of course I have no
ties to Chantry. They cast me off when I lost my sight, you see.
Blindness is also inimical to Order.’ He sounded amused rather than
bitter. ‘I was excluded from all stabilities, thrust out into the
Unstable after fifty years of service to Chantry. Strange, they
never do that to the deaf; only to the blind. I sometimes wonder if
that’s because a lot more of the elderly, Hedrin-chantors included,
go deaf rather than go blind ... but perhaps I’m just a cynic.
However, there’s nothing like being on the receiving end of
injustice for awakening one to the reality of the Rule’s innate
iniquities. I became an unbeliever overnight.’ The thread of
amusement was still there, as if he was laughing at the man he’d
once been.

‘You no longer
worship the Maker?’ she asked, and wondered if he had turned to the
Unmaker instead.

‘On the
contrary, I worship him every day of my life. It is Chantry I no
longer believe in. Chantry and the Rule. Not to mention the idiocy
of kinesis. But this is not what I came to talk to you about.’

‘Still trying
to pry information out of her, I see?’ Davron, appearing at her
elbow with Scow. He laid an arrow on the table in front of her
plate and Scow drew up two chairs for them to sit down. Both men
were dressed in riding clothes.

Keris picked
up the arrow and turned it over in her hands. ‘This is mine.’

‘That’s
right,’ Davron said. ‘You left it lying around in the chest of a
rather nasty animal last night.’

‘You went
after that thing?’

‘Scow and I,
yes. This morning. Found it dead a mile or so into the Roughs. He
was already being disintegrated by the Unstable, but we did manage
to salvage the arrows. Mine finally did the trick, I fancy. I got
him in the eye; more luck than skill, I’m afraid. Yours was lodged
in his chest-plate, which helped to weaken him. Dangerous shot to
make that, though. Pets are often reinforced there—with fur,
scales, thickened skin or whatever. Better to go for the throat, or
the underarm or the groin.’ He gave a sudden grin. ‘As I was trying
to do.’

A waitress
came by and dumped some mugs of char and a plateful of food in
front of them. Davron helped himself and passed the plate to Scow.
‘And now, Keris, it’s reckoning time. About the maps—’

‘I didn’t come
to Pickle’s Halt to find a trompleri map,’ she said carefully. ‘If
you’ll think back, you’ll know I wasn’t intending to come here at
all at first. I was booked to travel to the Second.’