Angel Isle (8 page)

“I may have something,” said Saranja, beginning to fish in under the coarse, high-necked blouse a farmer’s wife had given her on her way to Woodbourne. “My warlord was in council when his brother attacked. He liked to have me there, sitting on a stool by his knee, wearing a lot of his jewelery and precious little else, because I was the mother of his sons. It was a way of showing how rich and powerful he was. This was one of his prize possessions. It’s a sort of all-purpose amulet. It’s famous. It’s even got a name, Zald-im-Zald. It didn’t really belong to him, or anyone else. He’d looted it from another warlord who’d looted it from somewhere else, and so on.

“Anyway, there I was sitting on that stupid stool and smiling away till my face ached, when all of a sudden the castle was full of his brother’s soldiers. There hadn’t been any warning. Somebody must have betrayed him and opened the gates. Everyone was rushing around screaming. Five years I’d been longing for something like this to happen and worked out exactly what I was going to do if it did. I ran down to one of the laundry rooms and put some clothes on over what I was wearing and ran on to the kitchens. Nobody bothered me—they were all eating and drinking themselves stupid—but I grabbed a sack of scraps and I was out through an unused sewer-pipe I’d found and well into the desert before I remembered I was still wearing Zald-im-Zald. We’ll have to take it apart and sell it stone by stone, of course. We’d never find anyone who could pay for the whole thing. It isn’t as if I’d stolen it, at least no more than my warlord had, and I reckoned he owed me. Three times over he owed me, three times over. Once for myself and once for each of my sons. I was never even allowed to nurse them, you know. They were brought up by eunuchs in another part of the palace. They weren’t even told I was their mother. Oh, it’s mine all right.”

While she was speaking she’d carefully eased out from under her blouse and laid across it a prodigious ornament, far more than a necklace or pendant, a kind of chestpiece the size of a child’s face. At its center was an oval of brown-gold amber, clear as a drop of liquid but filled with inward fire from the refracted and reflected sunset. This was circled by faceted red gems, each the size of a man’s thumbnail, and out from these fanned sprays of smaller jewels, dark gold and then paler and then almost colorless, all set into a lacework of gold, stiff enough to hold its shape but flexing to follow the contours of the flesh beneath.

“Perhaps you’d better have a look at it, Benayu,” she said. “It’s supposed to be full of powers, but everyone’s forgotten what they are.”

He leaned forward, held his hand for a moment above the ornament, and carefully withdrew it and sat staring at it, breathing deeply. To Maja he seemed suddenly more involved, more alive, than at any time since he’d sworn his oath in the woods above the sheep pastures.

“Well,” he said. “It’s pretty near dormant at the moment, apart from one little stone. Just as well—if it was all activated it would send out a signal strong as a beacon. And there’s a curse on anyone who tries to question it or take it apart. I think I can deal with that, but you’d better not be wearing it while I’m at it.”

Saranja slipped the gold chain over her head and handed the ornament to him, but as she let go of the chain the strange vague magical feeling that Maja had all along sensed coming from her suddenly ceased. In the same instant she collapsed forward, almost into the embers of the fire. Maja jumped to her feet and helped Benayu haul her clear and turn her over. She seemed to be fast asleep, her face calm, her breathing slow and heavy. Benayu felt her pulse and nodded.

“Nothing we can do,” he said, and returned to the jewel. “It’ll be that active stone. This one. It makes the wearer tireless. Only you pay for it after. It must have been made to switch itself on when the wearer starts to get exhausted. How long ago was that?”

“Five days in the desert, she told us,” said Ribek, reaching for her wrist from where he lay. “And at least four since. She may have taken it off at night. I didn’t see.”

“And she’s still breathing? It ought to have killed her. How’s her pulse?”

“Not bad. Very slow, but fairly strong.”

“All right. Just leave her there for the moment while I close it down,” said Benayu.

He knelt beside Saranja’s body and laid the jewel across her chest. Maja sensed a blip of power suddenly woken, and Saranja began to stir. Supporting her left hand with his right, with his other hand Benayu moved the tip of its middle finger in gentle circles over one of the jewels, three times one way and then three times the other. Maja could feel a second blip as the power subsided and Saranja returned to sleep.

“That’s the best we can do,” he said, rising. “Nothing’s going to wake her till she’s ready, and that won’t be for a day or two yet, at a guess.”

He took Saranja’s shoulders and Maja her feet and between them they dragged her into the nearest hut, laid her on sheepskins on one of the rough bunks and covered her with a blanket. When they came out Benayu picked up the jewel, walked a couple of paces down the slope and laid it at his feet. Maja watched him stretch out and turn slowly, taut with concentration, pointing in succession at three boulders spread across the slope, then at the forest edge around and behind the huts, and back to the first hut. A barely visible flicker of light followed his movement and she could feel the rich, humming vibrations of magic as it leaped from mark to mark. Satisfied, he settled down and crouched over Zald-im-Zald, but then glanced up at her.

“That’s enough of a screen, I hope,” he said. “Anyway, it’s as much as I can manage. They’re bound to be looking this way. There’s too much hedge magic going on for them to have noticed what I was doing to Zald just now, but dealing with the whole thing’s going to be bigger stuff. Why don’t you go out beyond the screen, Maja, and give me a shout if any of it gets through? Sponge can go with you in case of trouble. Just call him. That’s all right, boy. Go and keep an eye on her.”

Maja couldn’t feel the screen at all until she reached it. Then there was a slight extra tingle as she passed through it. She could feel it stretching from point to point like dew-beaded spiderwebs slung between bushes on an autumn morning. Beyond it nothing.

Without Sponge beside her it would have been scary out there on the edge of the strange, deep-shadowed woods. She tangled her fingers into his fur and waved to Benayu that she was ready. He crouched over the jewel again. Ribek had raised himself onto his elbow to watch him.

For some while he didn’t seem to be doing anything except staring at the jewel. At one point his body tensed, but then he relaxed and continued his inspection. After about five minutes he raised his right hand, extended his forefinger, and with the fingertip held slightly above them started to trace the pattern of jewels, working from the outer edges inward. In the gathering dusk each stone glimmered or twinkled with its natural light as the finger passed above it, and even at this distance she could see the glow of it flicker off Ribek’s face, as though a fiery spark were running from jewel to jewel. Faintly she could feel the web of Benayu’s screen flex and quiver as it responded to the passing shocks of magic. At last he rose and waved to her to return. When she reached him, he was trembling slightly, and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip.

“I think it was all right,” she said. “I could feel something happening, but only just. I wouldn’t have if I’d been further away.”

“Trickier than I thought,” he said. “There was one nasty moment. I knew it was probably booby-trapped, because Fodaro had warned me about that. When we took the sheep to market in Mord he used to look the stalls over for amulets and charms, and buy anything he thought might be useful. Sometimes the dealers had no idea what they were for, and when we got home we’d find out and sell them on or give them to the other shepherds. Anyway, I was just starting to disarm the trap when I realized it was a bit simple for a thing like Zald-im-Zald, and I found the trap itself was booby-trapped. That was a tricky one.

“You know, it’s a really amazing object. I don’t think we should break it up completely—I don’t know if we could, safely. Most of the little stones round the outside are just ornaments, and we could take a few of those, perhaps, and get somebody to replace them later. But look. This is the one that kept Saranja going. These two are healers, for burns and wounds. We can try the wound one on your leg in a moment, Ribek. This one is something very strange, very old. I don’t dare meddle with it in case it’s something I can’t screen. These two are finders—you give one to the person you want to keep track of, or hide it on them if you don’t want them to know, and you can always find them. This one drives out fear. This will stop you getting fever. And so on. I don’t think this one’s got any powers of its own, but kings and heroes have been killed for it again and again, and that cranks up the power of all the others. And these are locks. They’re to guard the amber in the middle and keep the power in it sleeping. I don’t dare touch that either, but it must be something really big, fifth-level, at least—sixth, even. You can do all sorts of things with amber. It comes from the far north, from the top of the world. They do a different kind of magic there.

“Now let’s see what we can do about Ribek’s wound. You want to try, Maja? This one here. Middle finger of your left hand, three turns to the left and three to the right to activate it, and the same to put it to rest. They all open pretty much the same way, these basic charms.”

“You don’t need Saranja’s own hand?” said Ribek.

“You would for most of them. She’s been wearing Zald long enough for it to have attached itself specifically to her, but that wouldn’t make sense with a woundsain. It draws its healing power from the person who’s holding it, so you can’t use it on yourself. Trouble, Maja?”

Maja had reached unsuspecting toward Zald-im-Zald. The stone he’d shown her seemed not much different from any of the others, a clear, pinkish gold about the size of her fingernail. She could sense the sleeping power of the whole great object, but it didn’t trouble her. Then, just before her finger touched the surface, something had seemed to leap across the gap, and instinctively she’d snatched her hand away.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It was just a surprise. It didn’t hurt.”

This time she managed not to flinch, though the buzzy sensation continued as she circled her fingertip over the surface of the jewel, and ceased only when she picked it out of its setting and cradled it in her palm. Now all she could feel was the quiet flow of something passing from her to it.

She waited while Ribek unwound the bloodstained cloths from his leg, carefully cutting them free with his knife-point where they had stuck to the flesh. The wound, when he reached it, looked perhaps marginally better than it had when Saranja had dressed it a few hours back, but was still oozing blood and pus.

“Do I just touch the place with it, and it’s well again?” said Maja. “It feels…oh…gentler than that.”

Benayu didn’t answer, so she looked up and saw that he was no longer watching, but leaning back against the wall of the hut and gazing out over the darkened distances.

“Start with an easy bit and see what happens,” suggested Ribek.

She experimented, and saw the edges of a minor laceration gradually close together as she stroked the stone along it until the exposed flesh was covered with soft, pinkish, new-healed skin.

Behind her Benayu gave a deep and lonely sigh and shuddered himself back into the world.

“We’ll have to go through Mord,” he said. “It’s the only road south. And there’s a woman in the market there who mostly deals in charms and stuff, but she does jewels as a sideline. We can sell something out of Zald to her. I really don’t want to sell any more of the flock than I have to. It depends how long I’m away, and whether I’ve got any money when I come back. If I haven’t, and I’m gone for months and months, he’ll have to keep the lot, and I’ll start again the way Fodaro did, curing the shepherds’ flocks and making amulets and charms that actually work.

“I really love shepherding. They’re a separate tribe, you know, the shepherds all along these mountains, with their own language and their own customs. They won’t let anyone else join them or use their pastures. They’re very proud and fierce, the women as well as the men. When Fodaro first brought me here—I was only two then—they had an infectious gum rot spreading through their flocks along the whole range, and he cured it for them and spent all one summer cleaning the snails that carried it out of their pastures, so they let him stay and gave him some sheep to get started with. They don’t live in one place. They move to and fro in a pattern that allows the grass to recover, so we did that too, some of the time, as a way of not drawing attention to what Fodaro found back at our pasture. The great thing about them is that they know who they are and where they belong and what their purpose is. I really love that. I love the life. It hasn’t been at all like what Saranja was saying. I’ve never felt I was carrying a terrible burden. I don’t now. I know who I am, and what I’m for. I’m going to destroy the Watchers, and then I’m going to go back to shepherding.”

He rambled peacefully on about his far-off, impossible-seeming future until the flesh had closed completely over Ribek’s wound and the skin grown smooth and clean. Maja rose and stretched. She could feel that something had gone out of her, leaving a sort of satisfied tiredness, as if after enjoyable exercise.

CHAPTER
4

T
hree mornings later they halted and looked down on Mord. So far the road had wound its way south across rolling upland, mostly wooded but mottled with blotches of sheep pasture and here and there a village ringed with smallholdings beside a roaring stream. Now it plummeted, zigzagging down an escarpment at the foot of which lay a neat walled town with beyond it a wide and level farmland plain with a river winding across. Far south, at the limit of vision, rose another range of hills.

All that time Saranja had slept as though she would never wake again, by night wherever the rest of them were sleeping—drover’s hut or farmer’s barn—by day in a cunning horse-litter Ribek had adapted from a broken cot in one of the ruined huts. There was just room for Maja to perch sideways in front of it, but it couldn’t have been very comfortable for Rocky so she’d walked as much as she could. She’d been doing that when they’d reached the crest of the slope.

“Mord,” said Benayu dully, and then stood gazing down at the scene below. He had scarcely spoken an unnecessary word in the last two days, and had marched as though he hated every footstep of the way. They had left him alone, knowing there was no comfort they could offer. Season after season he must have made this journey with Fodaro, cheerful and confident, to sell and buy sheep at the market, and finished standing where they now stood, looking down at their journey’s end. This must have been the bitterest moment of all. At last he gave a deep sigh, squared his shoulders and spoke in a level, toneless voice.

“All right. If the Watchers are going to put an Eye on the road, this is where they’ll be doing it. You three should be all right. I’ve put Zald-im-Zald completely to sleep, and Maja isn’t picking anything up from Jex or the roc feathers. There’s an old ward on the gate, anyway, because the City Fathers like to know what kind of trouble they’re letting in. You should be able to spot that as we go through, Maja. It’s built into the stonework. Then there’ll be all sorts of petty hedge magic going on inside the walls. The Watchers’ Eye will be different. I’ll know as soon as it picks me out, but that will be too late. If you can tell me before…”

There had been a woman in the Valley who had been blind since birth, until one day she tripped on the stairs and hit her head against a newel post and passed out. When she came round she found that she could now see. At first she could just tell light from dark, then colors, then vague shapes which only gradually became clearer. But even then she couldn’t always tell what they were. She had needed to pick up a cup and handle it, as she had done all her life, in order to be sure of what it was.

Maja was just beginning to do this with her newfound ability to sense the presence of magic. First only the awareness of that presence and its strength, then a vague sense of the nature of the magical impulse and its direction, and now, for the first time, its rough form. As they approached the walls of Mord she picked out a heavy, dark vibration, straight ahead. It felt very old and was vaguely arch-shaped, and there was death in it somewhere. She told Benayu.

“That will be the gate ward,” he said. “They’ll have sacrificed a criminal and mixed his blood into the mortar when they built the gate. Strong magic. Nothing else?”

“A lot of little twitterings—I expect that’s the hedge magic.”

“Mord’s full of it.”

That was true. As they made their way through the narrow, jostling streets to the inn where Benayu and Fodaro had usually stayed, it seemed to be beaming out at Maja from all around. She tried to pick out separate pieces of it, but it was like trying to listen to one particular song in a cage full of songbirds. Only once, when they were passing a strange little house, so squashed between its larger neighbors that it was barely wider than its own front door, she felt something different, not a twittering, but a slow, quiet stirring, that seemed to be coming from much further away than the house itself. No, it was reaching her
through
something—a screen, perhaps, like the one Benayu had put round the drove huts when he was working on Zald-im-Zald. The magic itself was much stronger than it felt this side of the screen.

She told Benayu. He stopped for a moment and looked at the house. There was a faint liveliness in his tone when he answered.

“That’s a ward, not a screen. A pretty good one. It wouldn’t bother the Watchers, mind you, but I’d really need to work at it if I wanted to look at anything beyond it. Nothing to do with us, anyway. There are still a few Free Magicians around. I’m tempted to try and get in touch, but we’d better not risk it.”

“Screens. Wards. What’s the difference?” said Ribek.

“Wards are permanent and all-purpose. They stop anyone seeing what the magician’s up to, and keep out other people’s magic. A good one takes a lot of work to build. But they’ve been around a long time, and the Watchers can use a Seeing Tower in Talagh to look straight through wards as if they weren’t there. Screens are something Jex and Fodaro thought up. I mean they saw that it was theoretically possible, but they needed me to find out how to do it. You have to build into the screen a reverse mirror image of whatever magic you’re trying to hide, so that they cancel each other out when they meet. They won’t keep magic out unless you know roughly what’s coming, but Jex used to be able to do that for us. And they do have the great advantage that you can put a small one around you, so that it stays with you wherever you go. We didn’t think the Watchers had found out about them because they’d need Fodaro’s equations. In fact I’m probably the only person in the Empire who knows how to do them.”

It was strange to hear that astonishing boast in a voice so dull and hopeless.

The inn was in a quiet street near the western gate. Maja stayed with Saranja and Rocky in the inn yard while Ribek and Benayu hired a room for them, and then went with a friendly old ostler to see that Rocky was comfortably stabled while the other two carried Saranja up the narrow, dark stair. It was midafternoon by the time they’d eaten and settled in, and Ribek and Benayu were ready to set out and try to sell some of their jewels.

“You come too, Maja,” said Benayu. “You’ll be useful. We’ll leave Sponge to look after Saranja. He won’t let in anyone he doesn’t know till I come back.”

The trinket sellers occupied only a small section of a busy country market that filled a fair-sized square and spilled into the neighboring streets. For some reason it was not as crowded as the other sections of the market, less rowdy but with subtler and stranger reeks and odors, and lacking the otherwise ubiquitous petty magicians busking their wonders for coppers. But to Maja the area made up for that by the ceaseless murmuration from charms and amulets on many of the stalls.

“The trouble is, I don’t know anything about jewels,” said Ribek. “I can haggle over a bag of grain with the best of them, so I was thinking I could play it by ear, picking up from their tone and gesture and so on how roughly much they were trying to do me for, but now that I’m faced with it…”

“Don’t worry,” said Benayu. “You’ll know all right, because…Stop. Don’t let her see you looking, but that woman at the stall we’ve just passed. She’s trying to sell the stallholder something. Right?”

Maja felt a quick, soft pulse of magic come from him, and then repeat itself like an echo.

“Looks like it,” said Ribek, “but…oh, she thinks it’s a love charm, only it doesn’t work. She’s asking three imps for it, but she’ll be pleased if she gets one and a quarter. He knows that it’s actually a spiteful little cursing-piece—multiply any curse by seven, worth about eight imps in the trade, but he’d expect to get fifteen off a sucker, so he’s prepared to let her have two for it. So they’re both going to be happy with the bargain. You put all that into my head?”

For a moment Maja concentrated on the charm, and realized she could sense its nastiness.

“Uh-huh,” said Benayu, more animated again—it was the chance to use his magic that did that, Maja guessed. “Fodaro often brought me down here to practice, after we’d traded our sheep. He wouldn’t let me do it at home, or among the shepherds. He said that was dishonorable. But if somebody’s trying to cheat you…You can see how useful it is, especially with me picking the stuff out of the dealer’s head and passing it on. Mind reading isn’t that easy—anyone else’s mind is a wildly complicated place, and some are a lot more hidden than others—and all the dealers carry amulets against it, which you have to get past and they’ll lynch you if they catch you trying, so they reckon they’re safe. Even so, Fodaro used to keep an eye open while I was doing it, just in case anyone was noticing what we were up to. They’d need their own magic to that. That’s where you come in, Maja.

“The woman we’re going to talk to knows her stuff about jewels, though they’re only a sideline for her. She’s a crook with the customers, but straight with the other dealers. And the great thing about her is that she’s got a very open mind, very close to the surface. We haven’t traded with her much, in case we ever needed to sell something serious. All right?”

“I think I may enjoy this,” said Ribek, as Benayu led the way on.

They followed him to a stall whose holder was having some kind of friendly argument with her neighbor, but as soon as a customer showed up she left him and came smiling over. She was a soft-skinned, bosomy woman, her face heavily made up to enhance her dark and liquid gaze. She lavished this on Ribek with obvious approval. He responded with a touch of manly swagger.

“And what can I do for you, my dear?”

“I’ve a few small gems I’d like a price on, if you’d be so kind. I was told to come to you because you knew about this sort of thing.”

“A pleasure.”

She cleared a patch on her counter and he laid a folded cloth on it and opened it out to display three stones from Zald-im-Zald’s decorative curlicues. She picked them up one by one and studied them through a lens. Maja could sense a softly cooing vibration starting to come from her—no, not from her, from something she was wearing.

“Thank you for choosing me,” she said. “It’s not often I get shown anything as nice as that little garnet. Very rich, unusual color. The small topaz isn’t bad either, but the larger topaz—it’d be a very nice one if it weren’t for the flaw, this white streak running across it here, but as it is…”

“You haven’t seen a snow-stone before?” said Ribek, not mockingly but with kindly concern. He moved closer to her as if that were his main interest, took the stone and turned it to a precise angle.

“See how nicely it’s cut to show the structure of the snowflake,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ve seen a better one. As for the other ‘garnet,’ that’s a perfectly good ruby, first water, interestingly dark in color, four and a sixth tams, and you’re right that you won’t often be offered as good a one in an out-of-the-way place like this. The same with the yellow diamond, four tams or near enough, not my taste as a matter of fact….”

The stallholder looked up, still smiling, but differently.

“That wasn’t fair,” she said.

“My apologies,” he said, with a gallant turn of his hand. “I’ve found it a quick way to establish a relationship in a strange town. I need to make a sale, because there’s something else I want to buy, but not at any price. I gather you’re the only dealer in Mord who knows enough to be sure you’re getting a fair bargain, so if we can agree figures I’ll give you ten percent off for a quick sale.”

“Fifteen,” she said.

“Twelve and a half.”

“Done. Have you any idea where they come from? They were obviously set into some larger piece.”

“That’s right. I was told it was looted from the hoard of some warlord way out beyond the Great Desert.”

“Mind if I just run my crystal over them? There’ll have been power stones in something like that, like as not. They could have picked a bit of magic up, in which case I’d need to think again.”

“Go ahead,” said Ribek easily, Benayu having already dealt with the problem. “And then perhaps you’d care to join me for a glass of wine while we settle a price…”

“Thought so,” whispered Benayu. “She’s not going to let pleasure interfere with business. She’ll take him to an eating house and point him out to a couple of thugs she knows. They’re going to waylay him on his way back to the inn and take the money off him. I’ll let him know, but the way things are going they may be doing a bit more than having a glass of wine together tonight, and we’re going to need to leave early. Idiot! Who can you trust?”

“She’s wearing a love charm, isn’t she?” said Maja defensively. She had no idea how she knew that was what it was. It just had to be.

“He’s still an idiot. I’d better hang around here for a bit and keep an eye on him. I’ll tell him what’s up and hope he comes to his senses.”

“He isn’t going to.”

“In that case I’ll find a quiet place where we can meet in the morning and tell him where it is in case he doesn’t get back to the inn tonight. You’d better go back yourself now and have a bit of a rest. Even with Jex’s help you’re going to find picking up all this stray magic all the time pretty tiring at first. Do you want me to show you the way?”