Havenstar (38 page)

She recognised
him, and went cold all over.

Baraine of
Valmair. Prime Beef. Ley-life, how could she ever have mocked him
by privately calling him that? He was not funny now…

She sat still
and debated what to do. Plunge back into the river? Try to get a
knife into him—them—before Baraine used ley on her?

Impossible…

‘Maid Kaylen.’
He sketched the kinesis of formal greeting.

She merely
inclined her head. ‘Baraine.’

‘So we all
meet again. What happened to Graval?’

She withstood
the temptation to lick dry lips. ‘He died. Of a sore throat, I
believe. Came on quite suddenly. Alive one minute, then—’ She
clicked her fingers. ‘Dead, just like that.’

He stared,
doubtful, as if he could not decide how much she knew.

‘It seems the
immortality of Minions is not so long-lasting after all. You
did
find out he was a Minion, I suppose?’ She pretended to
examine her nails. ‘Better watch it, you scummy bit of boglife, or
you may find yourself absorbed into the Unstable with no soul to
live on afterwards, either.’

The creature
at his side sensed Baraine’s anger. It bared its teeth in an animal
gesture of rage, and lashed its tail.

She pretended
to ignore it. ‘Why, Baraine? Why did you give yourself over to
Carasma? You had everything a man could want, surely. Looks,
wealth, position—in the Maker’s name, why?’

He stroked the
arm of the creature next to him, allowing his hand to trail lower
and lower, until it was buried in the creature’s genital hair. He
smiled. ‘That is why, girl. This is why.’

She still did
not understand and he saw her bafflement.

His eyes
narrowed. ‘Can you be so innocent, so stupid? Try to imagine, if
you can, what it is to lust, yes, and to love, but never to be
allowed to fulfil that lust, that love. Because Chantry says it is
a grave sin. Because Chantry says it is a perversion. Because
Chantry says one man cannot lust after another. Imagine, if you
can, what it is to live afraid even to let your eyes roam in the
wrong direction, always to have to hide your love.’ He snorted. ‘By
Chantry’s Rule I was already condemned to the Hell of Disorder
anyway. What did I have to lose? Here I can love whom I please,
forever. Here I will never grow old. Here men can lust after me for
all eternity.’

A tumult of
emotion stirred in her: fear, understanding, compassion,
revulsion—she could feel it all.
The Rule,
she thought.
Causes always seem to be rendered down to the same thing: the
damned Rule. He’s right. He shouldn’t have had to hide his desire,
or his love, anymore than I should have had to quash my desire to
be a mapmaker. Or Thirl his need to be something other than a
mapmaker.

Reading part
of what she felt on her face, he said harshly, ‘I don’t need your
pity, girl.’ He smiled, and it was not a nice smile. All her fear
came flooding back in. ‘That’s better,’ he said softly. ‘That’s
better. I wonder if I should let Carve here loose in your
direction. He’s not fastidious in his tastes.’

She kept her
eyes on Baraine. ‘No. I can see that.’

There was no
mistaking Baraine’s anger this time. He raised a shaking finger in
her direction.

She shuddered,
the rest of her courage vanishing.
You fool! You’re going to die
because you couldn’t keep your damn mouth shut!

And then there
was a snorting heaving horse between her and Baraine, the sound of
a cracking whip and a wild cry of rage.

Davron’s cry.
Baraine’s answering pain.

A gaping line
of red was opened up across Baraine’s face and chest. Blood dripped
from Davron’s whip as he whirled it back for another strike.

And then the
scene froze as if time had stopped. The Wild was crouched, poised
to leap, spurs extended; Baraine’s hand was raised, about to make
some gesture towards Davron. His fingers crackled with ley,
Davron’s arm remained stilled, whip motionless. Then with a
deliberate gesture of contempt, the guide lowered his arm and
rolled up his sleeve to display the sigil on his amulet. ‘Dare,’ he
said, and his voice was thick with contempt. ‘Just dare, and see
what happens to you.’

One Trician
to another
, Keris thought. L
ey-life, how he hates Valmair!
With sudden clarity she knew why. In Baraine, Davron saw himself,
the Trician who had betrayed the code of his class by bargaining
with the Unmaker. It was not Baraine that Davron despised, it was
himself.

‘We’ll meet
again.’ Baraine said softly. ‘You’ll rue the day you struck me,
Davron of Storre.’ He turned away, beckoning to his Wild to
follow.

Pure
Chantry theatre,
she thought, but somehow she could not laugh
at Baraine. Even as he turned away, the cut on his face was closing
up, healing.

Davron swung
his horse to face her. The rage in him was intense and dark. For a
moment she thought he was going to seize her, shake her
unmercifully, but the moment passed so quickly she wondered if
she’d imagined it.

‘Damn it
Kaylen,’ he said without rancour, ‘what have you got for brains?
Sitting there like Lord Carasma himself, trading insults with a
Minion?’

‘Oh. You
heard,’ she said weakly.

‘Enough. Were
you out of your tiny little mind?’

‘It was either
that or blubber. Thanks, anyway. For making a habit of timely
rescues.’

He took a deep
breath. ‘Oh shit, Keris—’ He was looking at her helplessly, his
expression a mixture of pain and horror. It seemed a long time
before he had gathered himself together enough to say: ‘Please
don’t do that again. I don’t think I could stand it.’ He turned his
horse away from the river and called back over his shoulder. ‘Come
on, the others are waiting for us.’

~~~~~~~

Beware the
fence that devours the crop.

—old saying of
the Margravate of Malinawar

They were never
free of Minions and their Pets after the crossing of the Flow,
except for the one night they spent in a halt, where they felt
reasonably safe. Otherwise, sleek black shadows haunted them by
day, slinking away if anyone approached too closely; shapes
hunkered down around their camp at night, growling softly.
Sometimes Keris would catch a glimpse of Baraine, mounted on a
horned beast, with his tailed pet mounted behind him. At other
times there were different Minions, men and women she did not know.
Careful and furtive, they kept out of accurate bow range, yet near
enough to be menacing.

She thought of
the trompleri map and tried to contain her fear.

It was easy to
see she was not the only one who worried. Portron spent more time
than ever in kinesis devotions, while Quirk often preferred to walk
rather than ride, explaining he felt less conspicuous that way.
Corrian defiantly spat in the direction of their unholy escort, but
her occasional muttered, ‘Bloody unnerving bastards. What in all
the muck in the midden are they waiting for?’ showed that her
defiance was more for show than as a result of indifference.

Davron and
Meldor ignored the followers with superb aplomb, perhaps because
they knew that Scow, more pragmatically, rarely took his eyes off
them.

‘What are they
up to?’ Keris asked Scow when her nerves could stand it no
longer.

‘I don’t
know,’ he admitted with a laugh, then added more soberly, ‘I
suppose the Unmaker lost his spy when Graval Hurg died, so now he’s
had to resort to this.’

‘Were you
spied on before Hurg turned up?’

‘I don’t think
so. At least, no more than most fellowships are. I think we may
have drawn attention to ourselves over this business of the
trompleri map, unfortunately. Until then, I don’t think Carasma
took too much notice of Meldor. He was just a no-account blind man
who rode with Davron, and Davron was just a guide who would one day
have to do the Lord’s bidding.’ He shook his maned head unhappily.
‘I think perhaps it’s beginning to occur to Carasma that there’s
more to us than that.’

‘Then why not
wipe us out one dark night in a Minion attack? It would be so
easy.’

He smiled
ruefully. ‘Possibly. Probably. Do you think we don’t know it? But
apart from the difficulties the Unmaker has with regard to directly
conniving at the death of those who follow the Maker, he wants us
alive. That way he will learn more. About who supports us, for a
start. And let me tell you another thing about the Unmaker and his
Minions that may cheer you: they don’t have much comprehension of
time.’

She did not
understand and told him so.

He explained,
‘If one has the possibility of extended lifespans, urgency has
little meaning. Ordinary humans are driven to act now, to act
quickly, to try to fit a lifetime of living into a short time span.
The Unmaker and his ilk have no such sense of urgency, especially
those Minions who have been around for a few hundred years. Most of
them spend a great deal of their time sleeping. Even the Unmaker
finds it difficult to prod them to action. His best servants are
those who’ve been recently corrupted and have not yet forgotten
what it is like to be human. But even Lord Carasma is slower to act
than he should be. It is his weakness and has often been our
salvation. Meldor believes that the world could have been long
since disintegrated, if the Unmaker had worked at his unmaking with
human dedication.’

~~~~~~~

And so they
rode on, taking more care with their guard duties at night, being
more watchful by day. Around them, the land changed. Trees did not
grow here, nor did anything else that could be thought of as normal
vegetation. Fortunately, the horses and mules ate rounded bulbs
that pushed their way up out of the soil like giant grey pearls,
and appeared to thrive on the diet.

The ground
itself was twisted. The land had the appearance of being
momentarily caught in a hiatus of its movement, giving Keris the
impression that if she turned her back, everything would rush to
finish its interrupted convulsions. Those ridges of red earth,
shaped like poised waves, would break. Those sculptured rocks,
halted in the midst of the undulations of a cataclysmic upheaval,
would spiral upwards. Those teetering boulders would fling
themselves off that cliff.

And indeed
sometimes things did move. They would wake in the morning to find
that their surroundings were not quite as they had been when they
had gone to bed; they would occasionally see the land shift before
them, as if a giant were turning over in his sleep under the soil
somewhere, disturbing his covering. It was a world in the process
of disintegration, of being unmade.
Meldor’s right,
she
thought.
Things are growing worse. Father never told me that it
was like this.

Portron
apparently agreed. ‘I keep on expecting to wake one morning to find
there’s a hole in the world, a place where there’s…a nothingness,’
he confided to her one day. ‘A place where the ultimate unmaking
has already been achieved and nothing is left except space. A void.
An—an absence of anything.’ He rubbed his bald patch anxiously. ‘It
wasn’t like this when I passed through here twenty years ago.’

She shivered.
She did not want to hear.

The changes
made their journey difficult; Davron was always consulting his
charts, not Kaylen maps now, but the work of Way Letering of
Dormuss Crossways, a town in the Fifth. ‘Ley-life,’ Davron would
complain, ‘I wish this fellow could draw maps like yours, Keris!
Come, tell me what you make of this.’

She would bend
her head over the skins, only too aware that he was being careful
not to brush against her as they stood together. ‘It’s changed
since I was here last,’ was his constant comment. ‘The land is
becoming more and more unstable.’

And her heart
would skip a beat as she considered the implications, even as she
worked to interpret the maps and make sense of their own position
in a changing land. Letering’s maps had never been as good as hers
and Piers’; now they were often next to useless.
Still,
she
thought,
he does have an interesting way of showing the relative
height of hills and mountains. I’d like to talk to him about
that.
In the meantime she did what she could with his maps and
her compass and theodolite, the latter now minus its telescope. By
studying present configurations and comparing them with the past
landscape as drawn in Letering’s charts, it was often possible to
work out the best routes around recent changes.

And so it was,
after several false turns down dead-end valleys and several days
lost in backtracking, they came within sight of the Fifth
Stability. Davron signalled a pause and rode with Meldor and Scow
to the top of the small rise overlooking the kinesis chain to check
on their position, while the rest of the party waited patiently
below. Overhead, the stingray mantas circled with lazy undulations
of their wings, viewing the humans below with their piggy eyes set
on the underside of their triangular heads.

‘More spies?’
Scow asked, noticing them. But neither of the others answered.
There was no way of telling.

‘We’re right
where Keris said we’d be,’ Davron said. ‘I can see the border town
of Edgeloss.’

‘And the
Minions?’ Meldor asked.

‘They’ve
dropped back.’

‘Doubtless
they feel the kinesis chain. Davron, we have to throw them off our
trail.’ He turned to Scow. ‘I’m sorry, Sammy, but you and I and
Quirk might have to enter the Stab. At least for a while.’

Scow was
stoical. ‘A few days won’t hurt us.’

‘Skirt inside
the kinesis line and try not to let Chantry catch you,’ Davron
said. ‘The rest of us’ll go in to stock up on supplies, and we’ll
meet you south of Middlemass, in the Unstable. You know that canyon
with the waterhole?’