Vergence (33 page)

“Was that an octopus you had fighting in the water?” Ebryn asked.

Sash glanced at the fountain. “No, it was supposed to be a kraken. The waspa used to tell me stories about the kraken of the western seas.”

“A kraken?”

“I think it's supposed to have lots of tentacles, with suckers and huge teeth, and it's supposed to be huge — big enough to fill this square. Each time one of my friends told me the story, they described it differently. I think they were just making it up, so that's what I did.”

“What was your kraken fighting?” Ebryn asked.

“Just a waspa. I couldn't think of anything else. I made them the same size because I thought it would be more fun.”

Ebryn looked around. The children had all disappeared, leaving the square empty.

“Do you want to get something to eat before we go?” Sash asked.

“No, I'm fine, I've already had something.”

“Should we go then?”

“What about Addae? Aren't we waiting for him?” Ebryn asked.

Sash pulled a face. “He said he's busy today. Next time I'll make him promise to come with us, so he can't tell me some excuse the day before.”

They left the square, heading away from the claws, in the direction of the high market. Ebryn offered a silent prayer to the Virtues that her idea of exploring didn't mean a return trip there. Sash could spend hours examining merchandise, and getting to know the locals. Ebryn found it too crowded, too noisy. On their last visit he'd waited for what seemed like half a day while she picked through stall after stall.

“I thought we were going somewhere new?” Ebryn said.

“We are. I just want to see if Elouphe is free. He's doing some work in the canals near here. If he's finished, he might want to come with us. You don't mind, do you?”

“Not at all,” Ebryn said. Yet as he spoke he felt deflated, and he realised he'd been hoping for once it would be just the two of them exploring somewhere new together, without Jure trying to bustle in, or one of her friends from Teblin's troupe discussing the play they were working on.

The intensity of his feeling of disappointment took him by surprise, clashing with a niggling sense of guilt at wanting to exclude Elouphe. He looked at Sash quickly to see if his expression had betrayed him, but found her concentrating on which way to go at a fork in the lane.

“Oh, well,” She said, “you aren't really exploring until you're lost. This one looks as good as any.”

They were forced to retrace their steps a few times before they managed to find Elouphe. The canal turned out to be narrow, running along one side of a quiet back street, and barely wider than a deep ditch.

Echoing sounds of intermittent splashing helped them navigate the last couple of dingy walkways, following a jagged path between leaning buildings.

A tryth wearing the brown robes of the Emesues stood peering down into the murky weed-clogged water. As Ebryn and Sash approached they heard a loud splashing, and Elouphe's head broke the surface.

“More weed inside,” Elouphe said, looking up at the tryth.

“Can you fix it?” the tryth asked. “By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Can you do it quickly? It's causing problems further up.”

“Yes. Quick, quick,” Elouphe said, and his head disappeared under the water.

“What you want?” the tryth asked as they neared.

“We wanted to see Elouphe. As it's Twelfth Day we thought he might like to come for a walk with us,” Sash said.

The tryth grunted dismissively. “He is busy. Drains don't know it's Twelfth Day.”

“Oh,” Sash said. “Then can you tell him we were here, and say we'll see him later?”

“No,” the tryth said shortly.

After a moments silence she shrugged. “Fine, we'll speak to Elouphe later ourselves.”

“He's a bit rude,” Ebryn said as they walked away.

“It's fine. There's no reason he must take a message for me, if he doesn't want to. He's free to say no.”

“It didn't bother you?”

“Not at all, I'm just thinking of poor Elouphe. It's a shame he's missing this.”

“He seems to be enjoying his work though. He looked happy, I thought.”

“Well, the important thing is I have you. Should we take a symor, or walk?” Sash asked.

“I haven't got anything else to do today, so let's walk,” Ebryn said. “We can get lost together.”

A while later they stood in front of the tower, stretching their necks back to see the top. It looked very high, and narrow, a needle-shaped structure rising straight up from a raised stone platform. The surface of the platform had been worked into a complex, colourful pattern, spiralling inwards, and continuing up the face of the tower. At first it reminded Ebryn of the pattern in the skin paint on Sash's left arm, but then he recalled the Arrayal, and realised the pattern there continued the pattern in the mosaic here.

“What do you think?” Sash asked. “Do you want to climb it?”

“What is it?”

“It's the highest place in Vergence. Teblin told me you can see the entire city from the top, all the way to the edge. There's another tower like this across the city, on the opposite side of the library. So do you want to have a look?”

“If he'll let us in,” Ebryn said.

At the base was a single open entrance, guarded by a solitary cheg. The cheg stood on four limbs, holding a hefty polearm topped by a gleaming blade over a yard in length.

“I don't see why not. I'll ask,” Sash said.

The cheg shuffled a little to one side as they approached, watching with dark expressionless eyes. It did nothing to bar their path, raising one of its middle hands in a kind of half-hearted low wave towards the opening, which Ebryn took to mean they were allowed inside. Sash seemed to miss the gesture. She marched up to the cheg and stood in front of it with her hands on her hips.

Ebryn tried not to laugh. She reminded him of one of the Conant barn cats facing down a large stray dog. The bunched muscles at the top of the cheg's shoulder joints were easily as thick as her waist, and she barely cleared two thirds of its height, even with the lower four limbs on the ground. The cheg blinked, and leaned backwards.

“Can we go inside? We want to climb to the top of the tower to look over the city.”

It grunted something, enfolded her upper arm in one of its huge hands, and gently pushed her towards the doorway.

“See,” Sash said. “sometimes all it takes is asking nicely.”

Ebryn stifled a smile. “Can you get everyone to do what you want?”

“That's not true. You don't do everything I want, and neither does Addae.”

He followed her inside, wondering what she meant. It seemed to him they almost always adopted whatever plan Sash came up with. Partly, he admitted to himself, because she always found the most interesting things to do.

They found the interior dark, with narrow beams of light shining through slit windows barely wide enough to slide a hand through. A tight stairway wound upwards to the right, with a knee-high ledge the only thing to stop climbers from stepping into the central well.

“It's a good thing Elouphe isn't here after all,” Ebryn said, eyeing the stairs. “I don't think he'd be able to manage these.”

“Hmm, they are steep. Poor Elouphe, he's such a sweetheart — he never complains when he finds things difficult.”

By the time they reached the top the muscles in Ebryn's thighs were aching. Sash was a little out of breath, but otherwise seemed to have managed the climb without difficulty. The windows in the last section were so small and narrow they let hardly any light in, and concerned about the unprotected drop in the centre of the stairwell, he sent trails of faint golden light through the stone on either side of the stairs, like molten streamers running ahead of them as they ascended.

At the top they found themselves on a small circular roofed platform, about four yards across, open to the air on all sides through high leaf-shaped arches. A low stone railing in the openings provided no protection against the wind cutting between the pillars supporting the roof.

The light he'd created to guide them up the stairs gathered in a dwindling pool in the middle of the floor, almost invisible in the bright light.

“Ebryn Alire, you really are a strange one,” Sash said, watching the light as it faded.

“What do you mean?”

She pointed up. At the apex of the roof above them was a circular stone ring where there might once have been a hole, allowing anyone standing there to look up at the sky. Jammed into the space, a perfect fit, sat a huge ragged lump of sevyric iron the size of a small boulder. Easily over a yard across, it seemed to be bulging down into the space above them, as if stuck part way while squeezing through.

“How can you do that when I couldn't even summon a light at the bottom of the stairs?”

Ebryn tried to produce light again. It flared from his hands, like spirals of golden smoke, flowing without any resistance at all. On a whim, he decided to see if it would attach to the sevyric iron, and moments later the entire block glowed.

They looked at each other.

“I don't know. I don't understand why I can do these things. I don't understand why I was taught warding and folding, and almost nothing else useful.” He paused. Sash leant back against one of the pillars, watching him — waiting for him to continue.

“I don't think I come from Fyrenar,” Ebryn said, putting a growing suspicion into words for the first time, not really knowing why he was telling her. “I think my parents might have been Volanian, at least one of them.”

Sash nodded. “Yes, you could be—”

“And I don't look anything like anybody I ever ever met in Conant, or even Goresyn. Nor the Legenards I've seen, and I'm nothing like Jure, and he comes from about as far away as you can get that isn't furbeg wilds. I've always been like this — different from the people around me.”

“Well, you're in the right place for being different. You aren't the only one who's different. I'm certain there's no one like me in Vergence — no one else from Senesella. And what about Addae? And Elouphe? I haven't seen anybody like either of them since we arrived here,” Sash said.

“No … you're right.”

“You wouldn't be as interesting, if you were just the same as every other person.”

“So what's this tower doing here, with a block of sevyric iron stuck on top?” Ebryn asked.

“Teblin said there were more of these — he called them spikes — all around Vergence. Four on the boundary of the city, opposite each other, and four more around the centre, like this one. He said there are others but nobody knows where to find them, or what they're for.”

“I'm sure someone knows what they're for,” Ebryn said, making up his mind to find out.

“Anyway,” Sash said, “I didn't come up here for old rocks and lumps of iron. Come and look at this.”

She bent right out over the edge, barely holding on, her hands resting on top of the railing, and Ebryn felt his insides lurch. He stepped up quickly and grasped her arm, catching a dizzying glimpse of the ground some forty yards below.

“Don't go over so far, you'll fall.”

“No, I won't,” Sash said.

She stepped back from the railing, but didn't pull away from him. After a few moments he realised he still had a tight grip on her arm, and let go.

Ebryn felt himself flushing. “Sorry, I didn't mean to grab at you.”

“Yes, you did, but I don't mind.”

Sash turned and sat on the edge. Only a marginal improvement Ebryn thought — she looked like a strong gust might yet blow her over. He could feel a sweat breaking out over his body at the thought.

“I forget how much you hate heights,” she said.

“Don't most people?”

“Not as much as you. Why is that?”

He looked away. The space they were in suddenly felt uncomfortably small.

“When I was much younger I used to play alone on the Conant estate. There weren't any other children there, and nobody to keep a watch on me, and one of the places where I liked to play was this river — it's called the Luss and runs through the hills above the estate. I found a boat on the bank there one day—”

Sash watched him closely. “What happened?”

Ebryn swallowed. Part of him wondered why he wanted to tell her this today. “I took the boat out onto the river by myself. I don't remember what I planned to do, but the water was flowing fast, faster than I realised. I didn't know how to row properly, and I wasn't strong enough, so it swept the boat downstream. I ended up going over a waterfall, and I fell onto rocks in the pool below.

“I was told later I broke bones in eight places, half drowned, and nearly froze to death — the water in the river was very cold — so I should have died. Anybody else would have, but I didn't. Fidela said the village healer couldn't tell a broken bone from a bruise, but I know how far I fell, and I think he was right. It's strange to say, but the problem was I healed completely. I didn't even have any scars where I was cut. Afterwards everyone in the village was scared of me.”

“And you felt you were different. Alone?”

He nodded. “And that's why I don't like heights.”

Sash moved away from the railing, to the centre of the platform, and took his hand. “Well then, we can see nearly as much of the city from here, together.”