Havenstar (9 page)

‘More reason
now to ask it than ever. You will soon be an orphan and in need of
a man’s protection—’

‘I have a
brother.’

‘And he’ll
have his own family soon. You must look to start your own. I
understand that Harin Markle from—’

‘I will not
wed Harin!’

‘Ah.’ He
considered that, obviously searching his mind for a possible
reason, and not finding one. ‘Ah, well then,’ he said finally, ‘if
marriage doesn’t appeal, then perhaps you should then consider a
chanterie—’

‘I didn’t say
marriage did not appeal,’ she snapped. ‘It is Harin that lacks
appeal. And I have no intention of donning a chantora’s habit!’

He shook his
head sadly at her vehemence. The scarlet tassels on his brightly
coloured hat danced in emphasis. ‘Child, child, remember to whom
you speak. You must find your own place within the Order of the
Stability. Every person has his place, and every place is important
in the pattern of stability. You just have to find yours.’

‘I don’t
really have all that much choice, do I? No profession is open to me
because my father’s is not available to women and my mother had
none that could be passed on to a daughter, save that of a married
woman.’

‘You would not
want to do anything that would encourage instability or disorder by
deviating from your ancestral lines, would you?’ he asked gently.
‘The safety of us all depends on the obedience to the Rule of every
individual. And perhaps you have more choice than you know. If a
cloistered life does not interest you, then perhaps you should give
thought to joining the Knighten’s Ordering. That also is open to
one such as you.’

She gaped,
speechless. ‘Chantor,’ she said at last, all her irritation
vanishing in her surprise, ‘can I have heard you aright?
Me?
A chantist holy Knighte?’

‘Sometimes
those children who give us the most trouble are those for whom the
Maker has the greatest plans,’ he said simply. She was sure they
could not have been his words; he was parroting another. ‘A
Knight—male or female—has to have a character stronger than the
ordinary. A female Knighte must be a woman who does not fit the
normal mould of womanhood.’

She
interrupted. ‘Chantor, a Knighte must also be a woman of great
piety, ready to dedicate her life to Chantry and the fighting of
Chaos, the keeping of Order. Isn’t there twenty years of training
and study and kinesis and piety before a Knighte emerges from her
novitiate and can begin her roving life? I heard once that of every
thousand men and women who enter training, only one emerges fit to
wear the knighten symbol.’

‘An
exaggeration. I believe there are at the moment one woman and ten
male Knights. Eleven if you count Knight Edion of Galman.’ Knight
Edion, she knew, had been a man of great learning, revered for his
scholarship and wisdom as much as for his charity. He had
disappeared inside the Unstable ten or more years earlier. There
had been an outrageous rumour hinting he had joined forces with the
Unmaker, becoming his personal assistant. Others said the opposite:
he was actually fighting Lord Carasma in eternal battle somewhere
or other. The most persistent rumour was that he’d settled for a
hermit’s life somewhere in the Unstable, the most pernicious as far
as Chantry was concerned was that he had been murdered by some of
the more conservative of the sixteen Hedrin—the chantors of
Chantry’s ruling body, the Sanhedrin—because they thought he was
preaching heresy.

All of that
mattered little to her. Knights may have lived wandering unorthodox
lives of adventure, at least after their training, but the price
was far too high for her. ‘I’d fail the first week of training!’
she said.
And still be condemned to twenty years of toil, trying
to attain the unattainable.

He shrugged,
obviously privately agreeing with her. ‘If the Maker wants you, you
will feel the call.’

She thought
with annoyance,
He’s been told to look for suitable candidates,
and he’s decided it’s one way of ridding the village of me. The one
person who did not ‘fit the normal mould of womankind.’ Someone who
disturbed his sense of Order.
She smiled sweetly. ‘I’ll think
about it. And doubtless, if it is my destiny, the Maker will tell
me.’

The smile he
gave back was uncertain. He did not know whether she mocked
him.

~~~~~~~

Gradually, as
the summer days lengthened, there was less work to do on mapmaking
and Thirl was away from the shop more. Keris welcomed his absence.
Sometimes, when there was no sign of customers and her mother was
napping, she would take the trompleri map out of its hiding place
and pore over it with a strange mixture of unease and euphoria. She
longed to speak to someone about it, but trusted no one enough to
divulge such a secret. She had to content herself with remembering
all that she’d heard about such maps, with piecing together what
Piers had told her, and the odd snippets of information she’d heard
from time to time from customers.

‘Trompleri,’
Piers had said once, ‘that’s not the correct word. It was actually
three words in the old language. Three words run together to make
one, and then hopelessly mispronounced. The original words meant
“trick the eye”.’

Trick the eye;
it was true. That’s what the map did. When she looked at it, she
saw part of the world in miniature, shade and shadow, movement and
motion, all of it real with depth and dimension and texture. Yet if
she ran a hand across it, it felt no different from any other
mapskin. It was smooth to touch with just the slightest of bumps
where the ink or paint was thick. How much better just to look at
it! Then, it was real. She could see the hills projecting out of a
rolling plain, jutting up out of the flatness of the vellum, so
real that her mind could not understand why her fingers could not
feel their roundness. She could see the twinkling shine of sunshine
on a stream, its moving waters flowing across the skin, skimming
the stones drawn beneath. Yet when her fingers dipped into the
water, they felt nothing but the aridity of dried paint. Strange
nodules—plants of some kind?—shaded the ground alongside, yet when
she touched nodules and ground, they were all on the same plane. An
animal grazed on grass clumps, moving across the dry dust of a
blighted landscape with dainty steps; a rocky outcrop cast a shadow
that moved with the passage of the day; and once, just once, she
saw a group of people ride across one corner, mounts and riders as
real to her as the pilgrims who passed the shop would be to an
eagle flying high over Kibbleberry village.

And there, in
all its terrifying glory, was a ley line, snaking from north to
south like a colourful, poisonous serpent, contaminating the land
with its evil; worse still, inching its way sideways, sucking up
colour and leaving behind a withered burn-scar of grey that the
land struggled in vain to repair.

A trompleri
map moved and changed as the landscape it portrayed altered. By
showing the variations in light and shadow, a trompleri map
recorded sunrise and sunset, daylight and dark, or even the passing
of a cloud, the falling of rain. A trompleri map showed the
movement of people and animals, the passage of the tainted and the
Wild, the trek of pilgrims and guides, couriers and traders; it
showed all visible life—and the corpses of death. It was all there,
momentarily etched on two-dimensional vellum with all the three
dimensions of the real.

It was
disquieting. And wonderful. It fascinated and it terrified.

A trompleri
map was magic.

‘Imagine,’
Piers had said several years earlier. ‘Imagine, Keris. If I had
such master charts, there would be no need to risk my life in the
Unstable. When the ley lines moved, the change would be recorded
there on the vellum. And if an Unstabler had one, well, a glance at
the map and he’d know where best to cross. And when. A trompleri
map is the ultimate master chart. It keeps itself updated!’

‘But do they
exist?’ she had asked, her youthful imagination stimulated by even
the idea of such a wonder.

‘Once upon a
time they did. But the secret of making them was lost and gradually
those that existed disintegrated with age. Maybe it’s just as
well.’ He gave a wry laugh. ‘I’d be out of a job otherwise.’ He
paused. ‘And yet—’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve heard
tell just lately that someone has rediscovered the secret. Or is
close to doing so.’

‘Truly?’

‘There have
been rumours. But then, there are always rumours about those who
frequent the Unstable.’ He sighed. ‘It’s the nature of the place
and its people, I suppose. If I listened to rumours I’d believe in
dragons spewing fire and fire-flies that talk, in beautiful ladies
imprisoned by the Minions of Chaos and in heroes that rescue them,
in a magic kingdom called Havenstar and wizards who live there and
make trompleri maps—’

‘Wizards?’

He’d laughed
and ruffled her hair. ‘Ah, just tales, Keri. Nobody I know has ever
been to Havenstar and nobody I know has ever seen a trompleri map.
Or a wizard, or a dragon or an imprisoned maiden waiting to be
rescued. And Havenstar is just a dream-place, made up by the poor
wretched tainted Untouchables who fantasize about a sanctuary where
they will be safe and can lead normal lives, where wizards will
miraculously cure their ills. Many set off to find it. They never
come back.’ He shook his head, touched suddenly by sadness. ‘Pity
them, the Unbound. Think about what the name means: Unbound, pulled
asunder, unravelled. They have been partially unmade, just as our
poor Margravate was partially unmade so long ago. Theirs is the
saddest of all existences.’

Much more
interested in talk of magic, she hardly heard his sorrow. ‘And the
wizards make trompleri maps?’

‘So it’s said.
Tales, Keri lass, tales. Out there in the Unstable you hear a
hundred such stories and no more than two or three are true.’ He
grinned. ‘Usually the most incredible of all, at that. For that
reason alone I’ll keep dreaming of owning a trompleri master chart,
but I won’t believe in them until I have one such in my hand.’

Well, two
years later he had apparently held such a map in his hand. And a
fat lot of good it did him, she thought. It probably killed him.
Always supposing that whoever was searching his things was the one
who murdered him, and it was the map that they’d been hunting…

~~~~~~~ ~

At first she
had no idea what area the map represented. It was an abnormally
large scale chart—1:5,000—that covered only a small area. It
portrayed no halt or houses or signs of settlement. It was signed
with the name Kereven Deverli, and it was undated. According to the
title at the top, it represented an area known as Draggle Flats
West. It was certainly not a map of any place north of the Wide.
The names written beside the features drawn there were unknown to
Keris: Milkwaters, Gaggle Crag, Melldale Bushgrass, the Humps—she
knew none of these places. Even the ley line had a name she did not
recognize: the Writhe.

She searched
through some of the old maps Piers had stored in the attic, looking
for one that mentioned such names. These maps were not the ones
Piers had created. He had bought them from other mapmakers long
ago, before he had been married, in the days when he had travelled
widely in the Unstable, even as far as the Eighth Stability.

Eventually,
after an hour or two of work, she found the Writhe—or the
beginnings of it—marked at the extreme edge of one of the charts.
It was near the Graven, the ley line that separated the Eighth Stab
from the Seventh and the Sixth. The most puzzling thing of all was
that the Writhe angled south, beyond the Eighth Stability, which
meant that the trompleri map showed a portion of the Waste. But who
would ever want to make a map of such a place? No one ever went
even as far south as the Riven, the ley line that flowed beyond the
southern edge of the Eighth, not anymore; it was too dangerous.
There were no stabilities there, no areas of Order at all, just
endless instability and horror. Or so it was said by the few who
had gone exploring in years gone by and managed to return.

According to
legends, there had been other countries in the far south once. The
twin nations of Yedron and Yefron, wicked Vedis where tyrants ruled
and fabulous Bellisthron that floated on the lakes of Thron. The
most ancient of the Holy Books spoke of such places, but if they
really had existed, they did no more, or were separated from what
was left of the Margravate of Malinawar by too wide an expanse of
Unstable.

No one
searched for them anymore, no one went that far south anymore—and
yet here was a map evidently showing an area south of the Eighth
Stability. It did not make sense.

She put the
maps away with a sigh.

In the days
that followed she spent a lot of time thinking about the riddle,
but could come up with no answers, nor did she know who to ask. She
did speak about trompleri maps to several of the ley-lit Unstablers
who came into the shop; they all dismissed them as something that
may have existed once, but which were no longer to be found.

It was not
enough for her. The map she had was not old, at least not so old
that it was in danger of disintegration. Therefore, she reasoned,
someone had indeed rediscovered the secret of making such a map.
Someone called Kereven Deverli. And possibly someone else was so
desperate to obtain it they were willing to kill for it.
Because
of what it portrays, or just because it’s a trompleri
chart?

As the days
passed, the trompleri became an obsession. Its ever-changing beauty
enticed her, intrigued her, fascinated her. She tried to discover
the secret of its creation simply by looking at it, by examining
it, but could reach no conclusions. Her fingers told her that it
was just an ordinary map, her eyes told her it was no such thing.
Touch told her it was flat, sight told her it was contoured and
time told her it changed. The inks and paints used to fashion it
seemed similar to those she made herself from vegetable dyes, gums,
resins, oils, lamp black, earth pigments and mineral salts. What,
then, made it magic? She did not know and could not guess.