Havenstar (54 page)

‘Did Old
Malinawar once look like this?’

‘No, no. The
Maker is much more skilful at integrating ley than we poor humans!
Malinawar doubtless looked like a stability does. Our ley keeps
leeching out of the soil and we have to keep on putting it back.
Perhaps it is this instability that makes the result acceptable to
the Unbound.’

‘Come on
down,’ Davron said, climbing down from his horse, ‘I’ll show you
how it’s done.’

They all
dismounted to look at the complex system of irrigation gates, tanks
and sluices next to the bridge. The Riven’s ley, thickly livid and
rope-like, was channelled from the line into a buried holding
tank.

‘Looks like
animal guts,’ said Corrian, peering in.

Water and ley
from the Writhe were then added through irrigation ditches and
stirred by means of a giant wooden comb powered by donkeys dragging
the levers around as they circled the tank on the outside. The
mixture was then distributed into Havenstar through irrigation
channels.

‘There are
many such tanks,’ Davron said. ‘For safety reasons we space them
out.’

‘The whole of
Havenstar is criss-crossed with a complex system of gutters and
ditches and trenches,’ added Meldor, ‘designed by a man, Switchin
Lesgon, who was a master bridge-mender in the Fourth until he was
excluded for a crime. The ley is held in suspension in the water
and is then absorbed into the soil. Separated from the main body of
the ley lines and broken up into droplets, it becomes less
dangerous and less potent. Eventually it drains out again, along
with the water, and is either recycled or channelled back into the
ley lines.

‘It was hard,
back-breaking work, I can tell you. There was not one of us, myself
included, who did not take their turn with a spade in those early
days. At the end of the first year, though, we had a place where
the tainted could live and yet where a building was not reabsorbed
back into the land within a matter of days, or crumbled by
upheavals, or mysteriously changed in nature. When Haveners planted
vegetables or crops or fruit trees, they grew, and grew normally.
By the end of the first year, I knew we had created something
special.’ He clapped the Chameleon on the back. ‘Tell me, how do
you feel, Quirk?’

The Chameleon
hesitated. ‘Strange. At peace. As if…as if I have come home.’

‘You have. You
are an Unbound man in Havenstar. You may not be able to see ley,
but the ley that tainted you is still inside you, part of you, and
it bonds with the ley of Havenstar. The longer you live here, the
more you will love this land. You can’t see its true glory any more
than I can, but you can feel it. The ley-lit or the Unbound: who
can say who is the luckier?’ He moved off to speak to some of the
Havenguards near by.

Davron said
quietly, ‘Think, he created Havenstar, yet he has neither seen it
nor felt it.’ He sounded infinitely sad.

As they walked
back towards the horses, Keris eyed the guards and a pile of
halberds, pikes and bows outside the door to the bridge guardhouse.
‘What is it you fear?’

It was Scow
who replied. ‘Minion attack. Or sabotage of the system. If someone
were to flood the channels with too much ley—well, we might become
one gigantic ley line.’ He shook his mane at the thought.

‘Someone like
me, for example,’ Davron said harshly, his flinted voice scraping
across Keris’s nerves with words she didn’t want to hear. ‘He can’t
ask me directly to kill any follower of the Maker, remember, but
this…this he could ask.’

With sickening
horror she realised that this was what both Meldor and he thought
he was destined to do. She gazed at him, sickened with the pain of
knowing.

~~~~~~~

‘There’s one
disadvantage to Havenstar no one has mentioned to you yet,’ Scow
said cheerfully to Keris, Quirk and Corrian that night as they sat
at the camp fire, eating the damper bread Davron had cooked in the
coals. They had ridden deeper into Havenstar that afternoon, and
had only stopped when the sun was about to set, choosing a camp
site beside a stream under some trees. Keris was now delighting in
the intensity of the ley glitter. It was brighter in the darkness,
providing its own illumination independent of the firelight or the
night sky. ‘Remember,’ Scow continued, ‘cockroaches savour the
sweetest dishes.’

Quirk groaned.
‘Don’t tell me. The place is riddled with fire-flaming Minions and
pets with bad breath.’

‘Not quite,
but close. It’s the Wild that are the problem. They are just as
attracted to Havenstar as tainted Haveners like us are. You have to
be careful and we’ll have to mount guard tonight. As for Minions,
well, they could live here just as we do, but up until now there’ve
been none to worry about. They never used to come south of the
Riven, any more than the ordinary Unstabler did.’

Quirk
grimaced. ‘Until now. Until I get here. What is it about me,
Keris?’

‘Can’t be
you,’ she said sleepily and stretched back against her saddle.
‘Must be Corrian.’

The old woman
sent a stream of acrid smoke in her direction by way of answer.
‘What I want to know is this: why the Chaos I can’t wear a ring in
this place and the ley-lit can? It don’t make sense, anymore than
the Rule did, with Chantry dressing up like peonies and us poor
whores having to look our best in brown.’

‘The rings are
for the quick identification of the ley-lit,’ Scow said.

‘And why is it
necessary to know in a hurry who can see ley and who can’t?’

It was Meldor
who answered, his tone laced through with regret. ‘We deal with ley
every day in Havenstar. The ley-lit are therefore especially
valuable here. Only they can see what we are doing, literally. Only
they can be the irrigation engineers, our master builders, our
master planners. And sometimes in an emergency—which occurs often
enough—it is necessary for them to see at a glance just who can see
ley and who can’t. Hence the rings.’ He sighed. ‘I thought to make
Havenstar a place where there were no Tricians, no Chantry, no
hedrins, no knights. And there aren’t. Instead there are the
ley-lit. Our new aristocrats.’ He gave a smile of pure ironic
whimsy. ‘Lady Keris, here you are special not only because you make
special maps. Here you are noble, like it or not, because you’re
ley-lit.’

Corrian made a
noise that sounded distinctly uncomplimentary. ‘Wouldn’t you know
it? I end up on the bottom of the muck-heap yet again! Ley-unlit
and ring-less. Bah!’

‘Face it,
Corrie,’ Quirk said, ‘neither you nor I were fated to be noble.’ He
rolled his eyes upwards in comic resignation and then made off
towards his tent, too tired to stay awake any longer.

Was I so
fated?
Keris thought.
I’m just a mapmaker’s daughter!
Aloud she asked, ‘Where are we bound for tomorrow?’

‘Shield,’ said
Scow. ‘That’s Havenstar’s only city. There are any number of
villages, but Shield is the only place of size. We’ll be there
before nightfall.’

She yawned.
‘Chaos, I’m tired. Davron, I hope I’m not on guard duty first off
because I’ll never stay awake.’ Yet, even after the others had
dispersed, Scow to guard duty, Corrian and Meldor to bed, she
lingered with Davron by the fireside, reluctant to say goodnight.
She sensed a bleakness in him that scored deep; he was back in
Havenstar, and he believed he was doomed to destroy it.

‘I love you,’
she said quietly. ‘And I’ll go on loving you.’ The additional
words, ‘no matter what’, remained unspoken, but she knew he would
hear them anyway.

‘I wish I
could show you how much you mean to me,’ he said evenly. He sounded
prosaic, as if he was talking about the dust on his shoes. She was
not deceived.

‘I know.
Creation, I know.’

They looked at
one another helplessly, and loved all the more, from a
distance.

~~~~~~~

And out of the
darkness of the Unstable will come one who lives in darkness, yet
is clad in light. And he shall take up the sword to change the
world.

—Predictions V:
1: 4 & 5

Edion had been
born a wheelwright’s son, but perhaps he would not have made a good
wheelwright. He was a dreamer, even as a boy, and liked activities
that involved his mind rather than his body. He had no skills with
his hands and he was content to have it that way. Throughout most
of his boyhood he was even glad Chantry had taken him from his
family as a baby; glad because being raised by his true parents
would also have meant that he would have been destined to be an
artisan. With no understanding of what he had missed, he just
appreciated what he had instead: the opportunity to study, to pore
over the written word, to learn, even if it also meant the austere
life of a chantery orphanage.

And so it was
that Edion the wheelwright’s superfluous baby became Edion the
novice chantor, later novice knight, a thoughtful, perceptive boy
with a strong leaning towards the ascetic. Novice Edion in turn
became Knight Edion of Galman, philosopher and intellectual, seeker
after knowledge, a man with little interest in his own comfort or
in wealth. The change from Knight Edion, a fervent believer in
Chantry and the Rule, to Meldor the Excluded, a rebel against the
institution and its creed, was slow in its evolution and may never
have reached its logical conclusion had not Edion gone blind.

He had always
decried the pain the Rule inflicted on individuals. It offended
both his sense of justice and his idea that Chantry’s aim was one
of service to humankind. In his early years as a knight he’d often
spoken out against the more outstanding of the Rule’s injustices,
and had preached compassion and tolerance against transgressors
even as he himself lacked an interest in people as individuals. It
was more what was
right
that concerned him, than what was
kind
. If this was a fault in him it was neither one he
recognised, nor one that Chantry cavilled over. His superiors
thought all compassion should be subordinate to what was better for
society, and that meant what was better for Order. Chantry preached
the rule because it preserved stability; Edion questioned it
because it was unjust.

Such was their
respect for the depth of his learning and their healthy regard for
his popularity among congregations, that for many years Chantry was
loath to criticise Knight Edion for his forthright views. He went
among the people and preached his doctrine and generally the
Sanhedrin refrained from comment. Sometimes his criticisms were
even heeded by his superiors. At the same time, his most fervid
critics within Chantry, and there we many, bided their time until
they had an excuse to strike, which came when it became clear that
the knight was losing his vision.

Edion was
stripped of his knighthood, although not of a chantor’s
colours—those he chose to renounce himself, several years later,
after he had furthered his travels in the Unstable and discovered
the true extent of the suffering there. It was then that he
declared himself a free follower of the Maker, a heresy that was
deserving of death, although the Sanhedrin chose not to pursue it
for reasons that had a lot to do with their own popularity and
little to do with the Rule. Instead they allowed Edion to sever all
ties to Chantry, and to change his name. It was in their interests
to have Knight Edion of Galman sink into obscurity as quickly as
possible.

Although his
open rebellion occurred only after his exclusion, the seeds of
Havenstar’s beginning had been kernelled when he was still a
knight, long before he’d lost his sight. Driven by a need for an
interlude of contemplation and even deprivation, Edion had at one
time embarked on a long journey into the Unstable with several
fellow chantors. He’d thought to travel south in search of the lost
lands of Bellisthron and Yedron simply because he wondered if it
was possible to find and unite the lost nations against the
Unmaker.

Thwarted by
the ferocity of the Unstable, they’d failed in the attempt, but on
the journey he’d seen a triangle of land caught between the Riven
and a ley line he’d named the Writhe. It had contained several
fixed features that seemed impervious to instability, which was
strange since the area was sandwiched between two ley lines of
unequalled caprice. It was an exceptionally attractive slice of the
Unstable, a green and fertile land, well-watered with streams and
well-endowed with vegetation, a pleasant aberration in an otherwise
desolate, barren landscape.

He’d
remembered the place and years later—after he’d gone blind, after
he’d been excluded, after he’d been unencoloured from Chantry,
after he’d confirmed his own theories with regard to ley—he’d gone
back, this time carrying with him his dream of creating a home
where the excluded could live safely. There he applied all he had
learnt from his wide reading of both holy texts and the
unencoloured writings in Chantry libraries. There he created
something unlike any other place, stable or unstable, something
unlike anything that had existed before or after the Rending. There
he had created Havenstar.

He’d not done
it alone, of course.

By then he’d
gathered around him a small core of dedicated Unbound, men and
women who believed in his philosophy. Meldor had charisma, and he
preached a creed that struck a chord among the dispossessed:
Chantry was wrong. There were, he said, other ways to fight the
Unmaker, other ways to rebuild what Carasma had taken from them.
There was even, he said, a way for the Unbound to live in a stable
land. And he had shown them how with Havenstar.

At first the
movement and the place were small. In spite of his wish to make it
a home for all excluded, Meldor was cautious of incurring Chantry
wrath. He therefore kept Havenstar manageably small and its
existence and its location shrouded beneath rumour and
fairytale.