Havenstar (65 page)

Scow eyed her
dubiously. ‘How can you tell?’

‘The ley—the
ley is growing weaker the further we go into it. The damage here
was done hours ago, whereas back at the edge it was recent…’

He did not
understand.

‘Scow, when we
first rode into it, the ley was travelling from right to left and
it was strong. Then we went further in and it was flowing from left
to right. Further on still, right to left. And now look: ahead of
us it’s left to right again, but behind us it’s still right to
left. And ahead of us its weaker. Don’t you see what that
means?’

He shook his
massive head.

‘That man said
he was mounted on the Beast, pulling ley behind him. Davron is
going methodically through Havenstar, destroying it piece by piece,
line by line. Snaking his way. North to the Writhe, south to the
Riven, north to the Writhe, south to the Riven—slightly further
east after each turn, dragging ley behind him—destroying great
swathes of the land as he goes.’

‘That’s
impossible!’ Scow gasped. ‘Keris—think of the distances involved.
He can’t possibly cover all of Havenstar!’

‘The Beast.
That’s the Beast’s doing. Whatever it is. He’s riding some
supernatural beast, some anti-creation of Carasma’s. Something
tireless, fast beyond belief…’

Quirk drew in
a shuddering breath. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Go back. Wait
for him outside the ley, in that part of Havenstar that is still …
untainted.’ She used the word deliberately; that was how she viewed
what was being done to the land. It was being unmade, unbound,
tainted.

‘And then?’
Scow asked.

‘Burn a map, I
suppose. To destroy the ley.’ And maybe Davron as well.

He was silent,
thinking. Then he said slowly, ‘Keris, where is the ley coming
from?’

‘Out of the
Knuckle,’ she replied.

‘Would it help
if we, um, I don’t know, made a mess of the source, do you think?
You did bring the map of the Knuckle, didn’t you?’

She drew in a
sharp breath. ‘Yes. Yes, of course I did. I brought everything we
could possibly need.’ She slipped off her mount and unpacked her
maps from the saddle bags. Scow and Quirk dismounted to look over
her shoulder. There was no sign of any people anywhere in the area
portrayed. It did not include the bridge and the guardhouse or the
irrigation works to the east of the Knuckle, so the lack of human
activity was not unexpected. People did not frequent the areas
around ley confluences too closely.

The Knuckle as
seen on the chart seethed like a stew pot on the boil, but the stew
was as red as newly-shed blood and as thick as glue. It seemed to
pour over into Havenstar, a broad red ribbon of liquid…

‘If you
stabilise it, what will happen to the ley supply for Havenstar?’
Quirk asked.

‘I don’t think
burning the map of part of a ley line would stabilise the whole
line,’ she said. ‘Remember the map I burned? The ley from further
up just flowed around the edges of the stabilised bit.’

‘But it might
interrupt its flow
into
Havenstar. It might cut it off from
the Beast.’

‘Dare we do
it?’ Her stomach churned. ‘What if I’m wrong and Davron is still
there in the Knuckle? We might kill him. Or worse.’

By way of
answer Scow reached for his flint and steel.

‘No,’ she
said, assailed with doubt, fighting back panic. ‘No—don’t.’
I
can’t. Not like that
—

‘Then I’ll go
on to the Knuckle,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the map with me. If
Davron’s not there, I’ll go ahead and burn it.’

She nodded,
breathing more freely. ‘Yes. Good idea. If the ley stops pouring
over into Havenstar, then you’ll know that somehow or another, I’ve
managed to stop Davron and you won’t have to burn the map. You go
with him, Quirk. I’ll go back to ley-free Havenstar, and I’ll wait
there.’

‘It’s a pity
we don’t yet have maps of Havenstar proper,’ Quirk said. ‘Then we
could see exactly where he is.’

‘He’ll turn
up.’
As if I’m talking about a late-comer to a festival
dinner
, she thought, and winced. ‘You take the compass, Scow. I
can get back simply by putting myself at right-angles to the flow
of ley.’

‘And what
if—what if I am needed where you are?’ Scow asked lamely.

Needed to kill
Davron.

She stared him
down. ‘You heard what Meldor said. There are other chances. And
hear what I say—if Davron dies, it will be by my hand, no one
else’s.’
If I can
—

He looked at
her, considering, then nodded, took the compass from her and looked
away. She stepped forward, and deliberately kissed his cheek,
ignoring the pain it caused her. Then she did the same for Quirk,
pulled herself into the saddle and rode away without looking
back.

~~~~~~~

Behind her
Scow and Quirk exchanged glances.

Quirk raised a
questioning eyebrow. ‘Shall I come with you, do you think?’

‘No, I think
not,’ Scow said, with a hint of his usual humour. ‘I think we’d
both be much happier if you didn’t.’

‘Someone has
to be around to bop him over the head,’ Quirk agreed. ‘Although
just how I could do that when he charges past on the back of a
rampaging beast, I’m not sure.’

‘Just do your
best to look after them both,’ Scow said. The depth of sadness in
his voice said it all.

~~~~~~~

Keris rode a
little way out into the untainted part of Havenstar, away from the
throbbing ugly line of contaminating ley. She needed time, and she
did not want to meet Davron and the Beast before she was ready.

When she
decided she was far enough away from the ley, she unpacked her
mapping things and set to work to make a chart of her immediate
surroundings. She measured the distance between some rocks and the
top of a small hill to give herself a fixed distance for one side
of the triangle, and took angles from both ends of the line for
triangulation of the area she wanted to cover. It was not large
because she didn’t want a small scale map, and once she was able to
fix the main features on it—a clump of trees, the hill, the
rocks—she drew them in on a blank piece of parchment using ley
inks. By that time several hours had passed.

Before she
could start colouring the map she became aware of a rumbling noise.
For a moment she was not sure whether she heard it, or felt it. She
sensed vibrations through the earth, then a tingling in the air.
She looked up from her work to see a cloud of dust approaching
along the edge of ley—fast.

With a cold
rein on her feelings she readied her telescope and prepared to
look.

Distant
movement enlarged, clarified—

Davron, riding
the Beast.

He stood
balanced on its massive shoulders, a man tormented beyond reason.
His whole body shuddered. Sweat poured from him. He had stripped
off his shirt, and his upper body was wracked by the pain of his
terrible journey. The sigil he wore seemed too big for him now, as
if he’d shrunk. Lost weight in a matter of hours… His ribs and
veins showed beneath his shivering skin, a living map traced
beneath a fragile covering, to reveal a man touched by death. His
skull was a death’s head, his cheeks sunken, his lips pulled back
into an unnatural rictus smile.

His eyes, dear
Maker, his eyes. They burned deep into himself, sunken in hollows,
reflecting pain beyond comprehension.

And the Beast
he rode…

It was huge.
Larger than anything that had ever lived naturally in the world,
surely. At the shoulder it already stood taller than a man, and
those shoulders were immense. They gave way into a solid neck and a
head like a battering-ram. The distance between its red eyes was as
wide as the span of a man’s arms, and the malevolent gleam there
was pure evil. A single spiralled prong projected from its
forehead, and it glowed red-hot, steaming in the cool air of the
cloudy day. Powerful legs thundered the Beast on its way, churning
up the ground with their power, scorching the soil as the creature
passed. Flecks of molten heat flaked scarlet from its flanks as it
ran…

Davron drove
the Beast. He stood on it shoulders, holding twisting black reins.
Guiding it on its terrible path, a man tormented beyond reason. And
behind the Beast, attached by streamers of molten fire, came the
ley. A long red ribbon scraping blood from the land with its raw
evil, dragging its destruction through Havenstar, contaminating
with its scarifying touch.

Keris could
watch no longer. She dropped her face to her map board and touched
the nadir of existence in her despair. The Beast and its rider
passed her at a distance without seeing her where she knelt,
huddled on the ground.

She pulled
herself back to life, willed her spirit back to wanting to live,
forced herself to pick up her brushes once more. And made her map.
She made it as best she knew how, and should have been gratified to
see how quickly it took on dimension, how wonderfully it came to
life. Instead she concentrated on shrinking her vision of Davron
and the Beast to a tiny pinpoint in the back of her mind, for only
then could she work. Only then could she
live
.

And when she’d
finished, then there was nothing she could do but wait. And perhaps
that was the most terrible time of all. The Beast and Davron had
been travelling towards the Writhe, which was not far from where
she stood. At that pace, in just an hour or two, they would be
back…

~~~~~~~

She stood in
their path, at the centre of her trompleri map, and raised a hand
to stop him. Her other hand, loosely hanging at her side, held her
newly made chart behind her back.

He saw her,
began to halt the Beast, as she had known he must. Even if he was
driven by his need to complete his task, she knew in her heart that
she still had the power to halt his wild ride. For a moment. He
drew back on the reins. Leant against them in his effort to drag
the creature he rode to a reluctant halt. It balked, skidded—and
came to a heaving, steaming stop just before it ploughed into
her.

She whispered,
‘Davron…’

He answered,
and the answer shivered her with horror. ‘Keris, if you come any
closer, if you let loose your ley, I will be forced to kill you. I
am charged to finish the task and I must do whatever it takes… And
don’t doubt that I can do it. I have enough ley in me to blast you
from here to Drumlin.’ His voice was strung out with pain, thinned
with it, utterly unlike his normal gravelly tones. ‘Don’t make me
kill you,’ he said softly, pain upon pain. ‘Not you too. Don’t
attack me, please—I will be so much faster than you.’

She believed
him even though he never actually locked his gaze to hers. And yet
she heard the pleading in his tone, she heard the words he dared
not speak:
Stop me. Do whatever it takes to stop me. Please.
His spoken words were said not for her, but for Carasma.

‘Davron—’ She
did not know what to say. There was nothing she
could
say.
His pain unmanned her, dissolved her resolution, shattered her
determination.

The Beast
pawed the ground, and its fire licked out in her direction. She
could feel the heat. It was impatient. Davron’s hold on it was
slipping. In a moment the beast would be out of control, running
once more—

She could not
bear to see his pain. His hands were lacerated on the reins and
dripped blood. His chest heaved. His skin was scarred with burns.
She turned her head away, unable to watch him, wishing that she had
not heard the agony in his voice.

‘I trust you,’
he whispered. ‘You will always do what is right.’ He turned to look
ahead and flicked the reins.

Within that
movement, while his gaze was not upon her and his hands were busy
with manipulating the reins, she held up the map above her head and
touched her ley to its edge. He started to look back at her. His
arm started to move in her direction with its weapon of ley, but
was snagged by the reins wrapped around his hands. His devastated
eyes radiated their approval, their love—and his fear. He didn’t
want to die. Not here, not now, not at her hands.

There were
many words she could have said to him; she spoke none of them. They
both knew they could die, and die horribly. They both knew that
there could be worse things, perhaps, than death. They both knew
how they loved. Words would not have added anything.

The flame
flared at the edge of the map and moved inwards…

She smiled
through a blur of tears. At least they would be together as they
went forward into an unknown instant. Davron’s hand untangled from
the reins, and swung towards her, even as he fought it— She twisted
the chart so that the flames snatched the map’s centre.

The world
exploded into burning incandescence.

~~~~~~~

A tiny sliver
of time became an eternity, stretching out without foreseeable end.
Keris felt herself to be transparent, to be without solidity. All
around there was only white light, a brightness that precluded all
thought, all feeling. Davron vanished, the Beast vanished, there
was no background, nothing to be seen but light.

A feeling of
joy, so intense it burned, touched her mind. Love engulfed her,
heavy with power and weight, frightening in its hugeness—and then
vanished. She thought she was dead. She thought she was being
absorbed into That Which Was Created.

The light
disappeared.

For a moment
she couldn’t see anything while her eyes adjusted.

‘Keris?’ The
word was tentative, yet pregnant with caring.

She felt a
hand slip into hers and hold hard.

‘Davron?’

‘Mm.’

‘Maker—’ Her
vision cleared. Davron was kneeling at her side, still holding her
hand—and she felt no pain. Her eyes went to his upper arm: the
sigil was gone. Her first wave of joy was so intense she almost
fainted with it. Then she saw that he glowed with ley, a sick ley,
heavy with Carasma’s influence.