Angel Isle (45 page)

She turned back to the window. Still nothing to see but densely falling snow. The two generals seemed to be engaged in a furious argument. Striclan came round to her other side. His snake had disappeared. Gone in under his shirt for warmth, presumably.

“Benayu is exhausted,” he said, “and Saranja and Ribek are fully occupied. I may as well simply tell you what is going on. Pashgahr wants to abort the landing—”

“It is already aborted, is it not?”

“I would have said so. But Olbog is determined to go ahead, whatever it costs.”

“He probably thinks he has been made a fool of. It is the one thing that type of man cannot endure.”

“What I suggest would mean pretending we can do something I doubt we can in fact do, with Benayu and Chanad out of action—”

“I would advise against it,” Maja interrupted. “The danger is that he might then try to destroy us before we can carry out our threat. Benayu is in no position to defend us. I have begun an attempt to suborn the hired magicians, but they too are greatly enfeebled. We are on a knife edge, Mr. Ruddya. We must stake everything on what Ribek is doing. It seems to be as effective as we could wish. Ah, that’s better.”

A faint draft had sprung up while she was speaking, warm, and smelling pleasantly of lowland pastures. Benayu stopped shivering.

“No doubt you are right,” said Striclan. “Look, I think the snowfall is less than it was.”

She glanced at the window. The flakes were already smaller and fewer, and in two or three minutes had ceased completely. The late sun appeared over the western hills once more, shining in under the cloud canopy onto a glittering island that reached in almost to the shoreline of the bay and further yet to north and south. It was far more than simply a rumpled surface of snow-covered ice, all at roughly the same level, every detail lost beneath the snow cover. Cliffs and crags of ice rose directly from the sea, and then rose further into three jagged parallel ridges, culminating in a rough peak almost level with the window through which she was looking.

Scattered among the ledges and crannies of this forbidding surface lodged the snow-swathed ships of the Pirate fleet. Among them were two airboats, forced down by the mass of snow on their gas bags, which, relieved of the weight of the boats themselves, still floated buoyant above them. The remaining airboats were still aloft, but sinking steadily to join them. Maja realized that the
All-Conqueror
itself was far lower than it had been before the snowfall. What an end to a proud invasion. But she felt no triumph. Not yet. They were still on a knife edge.

Beyond the closed doors an alarm bell still sounded, but the cries of command had stopped. No doubt all orders had been given and the crew were readying themselves for the landing. There was silence too in the command deck, but not for long. Murmurs broke out and increased—astonishment, alarm, anger, apprehension. Ribek raised his voice above the incipient hubbub.

“Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. I want to show you something more important than anything you have yet seen. Will you all come to the window and stand in a single line…Thank you. Now, I want you to look through my eyes and see what I am seeing. I promise you that I will not tamper with your inner selves in any way. You will remain exactly what you are, apart from having seen something that very few humans have seen before you, and perhaps having a greater knowledge and understanding than you have now. For that purpose, will you please hold hands all along the line.”

Maja felt him take her hand in his. She sensed a hesitation on her left and turned to see what was happening. General Pashgahr was already in the line, and two of the others had joined him, but the rest were waiting to follow General Olbog’s lead, and he was still standing where he had been, a little back from the window, looking steadfastly at Ribek as if he could destroy him by glaring.

Even powerful men such as those we will be meeting have an instinct to respect women such as yourself
. Maja moved a little back, interrupting his line of sight, held out her hand to him, and smiled her grandest, kindliest smile.

“General Olbog…,” she murmured.

He came, a child at a party, who has arrived determined not to participate but then been overwhelmed by the greater moral force of the adult presence. Again he hesitated, but took her hand. His own was dry and muscular, the grip of a man who prides himself on a firm handshake.

“Be gentle with it,” she told him. “Old bones, you know.”

He forced his lips into the flicker of a smile and grabbed the hand of the man next in line. Together they turned to the window and saw what Ribek was seeing. She heard the gasps spreading along the line.

Nothing had changed, and everything. The impossible island was still there, not one snowflake, not one ice-splinter different. It was its nature that had changed. What had been a series of rugged infolded ridges was now the scaly loops and coils of an immense reptilian body. The dragon that had hunted them down the sunken lane above Larg would have seemed ant-sized beside it.

She had only a glimpse, and then it was gone, and the frozen island was there once more. Then, for a flicker, it was the incredible immense creature before the island returned. The flickering increased in speed until the dizzying double visions merged and she was staring more steadily at something that hung, poised, solid and real, between two possibilities, both equally impossible, the frozen island that in the space of a few minutes had emerged out of nowhere into these sub-tropic seas and showed no sign of melting, and the gigantic animal, far colder than any temperature at which life could exist, far larger than any size at which it could sustain itself.

Even in detail the uncertainty remained, as though every part of it refused to choose between One or Other, and insisted on its existence as both. The odd-shaped summit, with its swaths of snow lying between ice-green scaurs and outcrops, and pocked and pitted here and there as if some huge hand had thrown a fistful of boulders against it, was certainly an icy summit, but equally certainly it was the creature’s head, resting on the curving outer fold of the body. The two largest holes were just empty pits, but gleamed with the liquid luminosity of deep-sunk eyes. Two apparently random mounds marked by shallow pocks also existed as a pair of scaly hummocks bearing the quadruple nostrils on the blunt snout, lidded with flaps of skin that stirred to the slow breathing of the cavernous lungs. Hollows and crevasses were folds and moldings of the tough hide, as it followed the shape of the skull beneath. Beyond it the central ridge was the vast reptilian body, curving round in the form of the northern ridge, and back again beneath the head to become the southern ridge as it dwindled into the tail. Every detail both This and That, occupying the same space at the same time. Things that could not either separately or simultaneously be true, but were.

Human eyes are not made for such seeing. Maja’s fought for mastery, for the right to choose between This and That. Her mind resisted, fully certain of what it was seeing through those eyes, the absolute
thereness
of the creature, its presence, its power. All along the line she could hear murmurs of the same struggle.

She turned to see how General Olbog was taking it. He was also struggling, being forced to recognize the reality of the vision, and hating it. In the middle of your worst nightmare some part of you still knows it to be only a dream. What if you then wake to find that it’s true? General Olbog didn’t look like a man who paid much attention to whatever dreams he had, if he remembered them at all. As soon as he stopped gazing through the window he would try to treat what he had seen like that—a trick of the light, another stupid bit of conjuring, pay no attention—but henceforth it would return to him in his dreams, and he would remember them on waking. For the moment, though, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, but stood staring out of the window and shaking his head, like a drunk man trying to clear his mind.

“You are looking at the great Ice-dragon of the northern wastes,” said Ribek quietly. “It and its partner to the south built and maintain the two realms of ice and snow on which the well-being of this world depends. We do not have the power to summon it, the Captain and I. Nobody has that, no magician or group of magicians, however powerful, has that. All that we two can do is ask it. Nothing that has happened since we came to the window was done by us—it is all the Ice-dragon. It came of its own will. It brought the ice and snow of its own will. If it had chosen it could have crushed every ship of your navy in the grip of its ice as easily as a cobnut is cracked open between two stones. Instead, of its own will it has chosen that you should see it. Though the power to call to it runs in my family, only once in several generations does one of us see it, and then never as clearly as you are now doing.

“Why you? you may ask. The task of the two Ice-dragons is to maintain the well-being of this world. More than once in the remote past, the earth has sickened and needed first cleansing, then renewal. The two Ice-dragons have extended their realms to cover the entire earth, frozen it for a long age, and then withdrawn to allow the life of the world to renew itself among the tiny, unnoticed creatures that survived below the ice.

“Now, once again, there were signs that such a time was coming. The so-called Watchers, with their insatiable lust for power, were one such sign. Their ultimate purpose was to incorporate all life on earth into themselves. In the eyes of the Ice-dragon they were the seeds of a disease that would in the end have sickened the whole earth. Fortunately we were able to act in time and destroy them before it needed to do so itself.

“I cannot expect you to see yourselves in a similar light, but I can assure you that the Ice-dragon does. It has not come here, as we have, to prevent you from committing a single great wrong. It has come as a warning to you of what will follow if you continue on the course that you seem to have set yourselves. The very name of the great vessel that carries us all is a signpost on that course. I do not tell you this of my own knowledge. Like the vision of the Ice-dragon that you saw through my eyes, you are hearing through my mouth what it wishes you to be told.

“Now I think we have seen enough. It is dangerous to look too long on such a being. It can madden the strongest mind.”

He withdrew his hand from Maja’s and the island was only a craggy patch of ice, littered with the ships of the pirate navy. The tension broke like a wave breaking, into a hubbub of comments and questions. Maja turned to General Olbog.

“Thank you for joining us, General,” she said. “It was interesting, was it not?”

There was nobody handy to interpret, but he caught her tone, favored her with his mini-smile, grunted some guttural politeness, nodded by way of farewell and turned away.

“I’ve got to get us out of here,” muttered Benayu. “Fading faster than I expected. Won’t have anything left if I don’t go soon. Need Chanad to help, as it is.”

“I will talk to Ribek. You go and sit down.”

A dozen people, Syndics and soldiers, were already crowded round Ribek, bombarding him with questions. Most were men, taller than she was. She rapped an officer on the shoulder with the handle of her cane. He turned his head, cut his protest short when he saw who it was, and made a gap. The movement caught Ribek’s eye. She beckoned, drew aside and waited for him to join her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw somebody sidling in earshot. The Pirates’ translator.

“My boy Bennay’s been taken ill, and I do not have the remedy with me,” she said. “I must get him ashore.”

“It’s time we went in any case, my lady,” he said. “If you would be so good as to tell the others…”

He turned to his audience.

“Please,” he said. “No more questions for the moment. We have to leave in a minute. We have done what we came to do by preventing your attack on Larg. This was an emergency action. We do not have the authority to act further on behalf of the Imperial Government. We will leave you to discuss what you have seen and heard, and we will be ready to meet you for a truce conference an hour before noon tomorrow morning on the headland you can see to the south of Larg. We will permit one airboat large enough to carry your delegation, but no larger, to be cleared of snow to bring them ashore under our safe conduct. This will be a sign that you accept our conditions. If we receive no such signal your fleet will be destroyed at sunset.

“So we bid you farewell, and hope to see you tomorrow on the headland. Madam President-designate, if you are ready.”

Chanad was talking to the three renegades. She looked down and nodded. Maja and the others gathered around her. Saranja turned and saluted the room. Chanad made a gentle gesture of closure, and the space where they had been standing was empty.

CHAPTER
25

T
he citizens of Larg had been watching from their walls in awe and fear as the Pirate fleet closed in on them, regardless of wind or tide—fear that changed to amazement as the ships and airboats were blotted out by a brief but intense blizzard in the midst of the calm and sunlit bay, and then changed again to delighted relief when the blizzard cleared, revealing the impossible island of ice, with the ships stranded and helpless on it and the snow-burdened airboats drifting down to join them.

They saw three winged horses emerge from the largest of the airboats and some keen-eyed watchers recognized Saranja’s streaming mane. So it was that when Saranja and Striclan, the only two of the travelers able to cross Zara’s still functioning ward, headed down the hill to tell the Proctors what was afoot, and what would now be needed, they found a welcoming party climbing to meet them.

Maja fell asleep under the stars once more, well fed and on comfortable bedding ferried up from the city. The needs of her Lady Kzuva self woke her in the small hours, and on her return she paused and stared out to sea. There, plain to her long-sightedness, stood the flame-crested pillar that imprisoned Azarod, black against the moonlit glitter of the island, both astonishing in themselves but still only rock and flame and ice, things of this world. The scene twitched, and now she was seeing them as they might have been seen in the worlds where they belonged, the raging demon and the immense unknowable dragon. She couldn’t remember going back to her mattress, apart from a vague sense of having floated there, with all the quiet magic of the sleeping world now vivid to her extra sense. She was too dazed to register the strangeness of the change.

Nor could she remember waking and eating, though she must have done, because now she was standing leaning on her cane, fully dressed, with the taste of food in her mouth, while Chanad, Ribek and Saranja talked urgently together, and Benayu and Striclan stood and listened. Striclan had his arm round Benayu, supporting him. Benayu was looking really ill.

In that moment Maja understood what was happening to her.

“Listen,” she said urgently. “Sometimes I don’t know what Lady Kzuva’s saying and doing. She’s not protecting me from magic, either. I think I’m coming apart.”

“Indeed you are,” said Chanad. “Benayu is exhausted. He cannot keep Lady Kzuva here much longer. I could do it, but it would take all my attention, and that is needed for the conference. If we don’t send her back where she belongs in the next two hours we shall lose you both. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Even when we’re together I—we—feel very odd. Dazed, dizzy. I don’t think she knows what I’m saying now.”

“But we need Lady K for the conference,” said Saranja. “She represents the Landholders, who’ve got a lot of say-so on the Empire, so she’s got to set her seal on the final document.”

“Couldn’t you send her home now, and just make me look like her? I think I could do that, now that I’ve been her for a bit. Act like her and talk like her, I mean, provided I don’t have to say too much. I could tell them I’m tired after all that magic yesterday. I’m out of practice.”

“That is what we were talking about,” said Chanad. “A mugal—a simulacrum controlled by a living spirit within it. Quiriul and her two colleagues could do it, I think. I’ve already arranged for them to transport themselves to us and tell us what has been happening aboard the
All-Conqueror
. I will ask them to come as soon as they can.”

“How long will the mugal thing take?” said Ribek. “Will they be able to do it before the delegation gets here? The airboat will be ready to leave as soon as they’ve cleared the snow off its gas bag, and they’re halfway through that already. It’d be nice to have Lady K in there to—”

Sudden and close, a jolt of magic. A glimpse of three figures just beyond Chanad’s shoulder. Maja was back in her daze.

A hand gripping her elbow, shaking her arm. Ribek’s urgent mutter in her ear.

“Wake up, Maja! Wake up if you can! We need you!”

With a willed effort she hauled her two halves into oneness and held them steady. She was standing beside him on the crown of the headland. All around them a gaudy encampment had arisen, pavilions, rest tents and awnings, flags and pennons, and side by side in pride of place the green banner of Larg and blue-and-white one of the Pirate fleet.

They were waiting on a level patch of turf that had been left clear beside the largest pavilion. The dignitaries of Larg were lined up to one side, with their President Proctor and the fake Imperial delegation in front of them. What seemed like half the citizens of Larg watched from the perimeter. In perfect silence the airboat descended into the center. The gondola touched soundlessly onto the turf. Pumps pulsed briefly, then silence again, with the gas bag swaying in the light breeze. A section of the hull hinged downward and became a ramp and General Pashgahr appeared in the opening with a pale-faced dumpy woman beside him. Maja recognized her as the Syndic she’d particularly noticed yesterday.

They paused while a dozen trumpets sounded an elaborate fanfare. The President Proctor, with Chanad at his side, moved forward to meet them as they came down the ramp. The pealing of the bells of Larg sounded musically in the distance. Speeches began, but she barely heard them as the daze returned.

Another jolt of magic, this time as deliberate as Ribek’s shaking her arm had been to force her to wakefulness. She was standing in one of the smaller tents, with both hands clutching the central pole. Just the other side of the pole stood a woman Maja had never seen before, with both arms outstretched, holding hands with two people out of sight behind Maja. She could sense that all three were magicians, and that she was standing near the apex of a triangle formed by their arms. Benayu was watching from behind the woman’s shoulder. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He was nibbling at his thumb knuckle like a child, feverish with anxiety.

“I am Quiriul,” said the woman. “We prefer our former employers not to recognize us. Now, if I may, my lady…”

She placed her own hands over Maja’s.

“Brod is going to construct the simulacrum while Turbax prepares your shielding within it,” she said. “Meanwhile I will separate your consciousness from that of Lady Kzuva and control your transference to the simulacrum. I have to warn you that you won’t be shielded at all while that is happening, so you will have to prepare yourself for a brief period of considerable stress. And once the process has started it cannot be stopped without fatal results to at least one of you.”

Unwilled, a dreamy whisper issued from Maja’s lips.

“Let it be me who dies, should that happen,” said Lady Kzuva. “Maja has many more years to live.”

Quiriul hesitated, clearly taken aback. She sighed and shook her head.

“I can’t choose,” she said. “This is difficult enough as it is. We must simply not let it happen. When the transfer is complete Brod will see Lady Kzuva safely back to her own place while Turbax and I coordinate the speech and movement of the simulacrum with Maja’s intentions. Now, will you stand as still as you can and look into my eyes.”

Maja couldn’t see them clearly without her spectacles, but they seemed to be just a pair of normal green eyes. Little happened for what seemed a long while. She could sense both Turbax and Brod busy behind her, sense too, beside the magic they were preparing, something amiss between them, Turbax’s mild contempt for Brod, who was older but less accomplished, and Brod’s resentment of it. She must warn Chanad about that, she thought…

“Now,” whispered Quiriul. “Look, Lady Kzuva. Look, Maja.”

Maja concentrated. Quiriul’s eyes were now clear to her. Green, yes, but flecked with brown. They grew larger, like two pools welling up in their hollows, joining together, covering lashes and lids, brows, nose and cheeks, the whole face. And at the same time the sphere of Maja’s vision seemed to narrow until the pool was all that she could see, with the two black irises pulsing gently side by side while the brown flecks, glowing now with a smoky light, moved hypnotically around and between them. The pool floated toward her, filled her vision, absorbed her. She felt dizzy, drugged, only vaguely aware of her own body. Whose body? Hers? Lady Kzuva’s?—she didn’t know. Time passed, unmeasurable. All that changed was a faint, vague pressure against her shoulder blades, insubstantial as mist, but slowly becoming firmer.

Without warning the tent pole faded from her grasp. She heard Benayu’s urgent mutter close in her ear. The shreds of her shielding vanished and she was naked to the triple whirlpool of magic swirling though the little tent. There was someone there with her, being whirled in the same tempest, inert, helpless—Benayu. Desperately, twisting to and fro, she flung her arm round him, clutched him against her, and with her other arm clung to the rock of her own selfhood, Maja, Maja, Maja…and then she was left gasping in a different kind of shelter, improvised and patchy, like a drafty shed that is still better than nothing in the blast of winter.

Shuddering with relief she looked around her. She was still in the tent, but with the entrance now in front of her. Her back was against the tent pole with some kind of sash holding her firmly in place there. She seemed to have no sense of balance and would have fallen without it. That must be Turbax to her left, but Brod was gone from her other side. Where was Benayu? She tried to turn her head. Pain lanced up her spine.

“Wait,” said Quiriul’s voice behind her. “You are not yet ready to move.”

Maja forced the unfamiliar mouth to cooperate.

“Benayu? What?” she croaked.

“I almost lost you. He came to help. It overstretched him. He is here, but unconscious. Wait. We must finish our work, or we will lose you again. Breathe deeply in, and out again.”

Maja realized now that she hadn’t been breathing at all. For a moment nothing happened. Then, with a rush, the air came. With a willed effort she forced it back out.

“Good,” said Quiriul. “And again. And again.”

Maja obeyed. Her breath steadied and continued of its own accord. With a painful convulsion her heart began to beat. Saliva flowed, but she needed her conscious mind to decide to swallow it. Sometimes on her own, sometimes on Quiriul’s instructions, she worked her way round all the normally unnoticed functions of her body. As each piece fitted itself into place others joined themselves to the growing wholeness. Her sense of balance returned unnoticed.

“Well done,” said Quiriul. “Now we will coordinate your movements….”

But turning her head Maja had seen from the corner of her eyes a green and gold hummock sprawled against the side of the tent.

“May I speak?”

“Try.”

Maja steadied herself, summoned the authority she had learned as the real Lady Kzuva.

“Bennay. Benayu,” she said. “He’s more important than any of us. We can’t just let him lie there. He came to the edge to find me and brought me back. We’ve got to do something.”

“I daren’t interfere magically,” said Quiriul. “He is far out of my reach. There is nothing any of us can do directly, apart from rest and quiet and peace of mind. He was desperately anxious for you. He knew we would be working at the limit of our powers. That was why he insisted on being present. So now the best we can do for him is to finish our work. Even as he is he may be aware that you are out of danger.”

“All right.”

“Nod then…Exercise your neck…Now your right arm, starting at the shoulder, and down to the individual fingers…”

They worked systematically on. Impatiently Maja took her first pace.

“That will have to do,” she said, practicing her Lady Kzuva manner. “Thank you for your help. I know you are tired, but would you be kind enough to wait with my boy, Madam Quiriul, until I can send somebody to see him well looked after. And you, sir, you must be Master Turbax.”

He was the one who’d had the tiger’s head. She could tell from the yellowish glow in his eyes.

“At your service, my lady,” he said smoothly, and managed a smile. But it was a smile that said,
Why should I bother? You’re only a child pretending to be a great lady. And who cares about Benayu? He’s washed up, done for. Better carry through with the charade. Important to ingratiate myself with the President-designate.

Too late, Master Turbax,
Maja thought.
I’m going to warn her. You aren’t as clever as you think you are.

“And you are responsible for my shielding,” she said. “I am most grateful. Now if you would be so kind as to see me to the conference tent.”

Several of the functionaries of the Provost’s Court were waiting beside the entrance. Maja spotted the one who had come up from Larg with the old groom on the morning after the defeat of Azarod, to bring their breakfast and tell them to get ready for the visit from the Proctors themselves. She caught his eye and beckoned him over.

“My lady?” he said.

“My boy has been taken seriously ill. He is in that small tent with the yellow pennant. Please arrange to have him carried somewhere where he can rest and not be disturbed. The woman now with him will tell you what else is needed.”