Havenstar (12 page)

As she rode
into Hopen Grat with Chantor Portron, Keris felt overwhelmed. Her
earlier confidence had ebbed away. Everyone seemed to be shouting,
pushing, shoving. All about her purses were being stolen, bottoms
pinched, bargains made, wagers lost. Hopen Grat made her feel
dirty.

‘Watch your
purse, lass,’ Portron said unnecessarily under his breath.

‘Is it always
like this?’ she asked and kicked away a hand that groped for
Ygraine’s bridle.

‘Every time
I’ve been here, anyways. Shall we be hunting out the guides before
making camp, do you think?’

She nodded. ‘I
wouldn’t want to leave our tents unattended in a place like this.’
A blue-scaled hand brushed her boot and she flinched away in alarm.
The owner of the arm scuttled away between a press of mounted men,
but not before she’d had an impression of webbed feet and a
hairless head sunk directly on to bony shoulders. She turned
wide-eyed to Portron. ‘Chantor, the Unbound come here?’

‘Aye.’ His
tone was a mixture of distaste and distress. ‘It’s hard to stop
them. They’re coming for supplies, poor souls. The Defenders do
patrol the length of the kineses chain sometimes, but you’ll need
hundreds of men to keep the tainted from crossing the border
entirely.’

She was
shocked. ‘But the kinesis chain should keep them out—’

‘It works
better against the Wild and Minions. The Unbound aren’t noticing it
much, I’m thinking, at least not unless they’ve committed
themselves to the Unmaker. It’s more Order that repulses the
tainted and, as you may have noticed, there’s not too much Order
here. Alas, you can see many of the excluded here too, not just the
Unbound. Hopen Grat’s a dangerous place, I’m always thinking, lass.
Murders aplenty, and the corpses bear the mark of the tainted often
enough. Keep your wits about you. Hey you,’ he called to a passing
hawker of supposedly magical amulets, ‘where do we find the
guides?’

‘First right
and straight on! An amulet, maid? Guaranteed effective for ten days
against ley tainting.’

The amulet,
Keris knew, would be useless for all its guarantee. She nudged
Ygraine after the chantor and Tousson followed obediently. When a
stranger put a hand to the packs, the crossings-horse turned to nip
at him savagely.

The guides
were camped along a rise away from the worst of the town. She
surveyed the neat row of canvas and tethered animals with approval.
Guides had the same orderliness to their camps that Piers had
inculcated in her. ‘Which go where?’ she asked.

‘Look at the
numbers,’ Portron said. Each camp had a number indicated somewhere,
scrawled in charcoal on the canvas perhaps, or just indicated by a
number of ribbons fluttering from a ridge-pole. ‘You’ll be having a
choice, Maid Kereven. There’s five or six bound for the Second
Stab. I’ll just have to take this one.’ He pointed his fly switch
at a canvas strung between two trees. In the shade beneath, a man
lay at his ease on a bed roll, his head pillowed on a pack with a
hat tilted over his eyes.

She knew
instantly who it was and repressed a feeling of vague unease.
Just because a cat didn’t like him, doesn’t mean he’s
evil
…

Still, she
remained seated on Ygraine while Portron dismounted and went
forward on foot. ‘Um, begging your pardon for rousing you, Master
Guide, but would your services be for hire to the Eighth Stab?’ he
asked.

The hat tilted
back and the head raised itself a little. Black eyes, the same
obsidian chips she had expected to see, scanned the chantor
neutrally. Whatever it was that had been the cause of his shame
back in Kibbleberry, it didn’t seem to make him blush in the
presence of a rule-chantor. ‘They are,’ he said in that voice like
the scrape of a millstone. He sat up but didn’t bother to stand, or
even make a kinesis of greeting. ‘I’m leaving first light tomorrow.
Ten golds each for the full journey, payable before we leave. You
supply your own hard rations, enough to get as far as the Fifth.
And I don’t travel with Defenders. If you want an armed fellowship,
you’ll have to wait another three weeks for Mink Medrigan’s.’ His
eyes flicked briefly to her. ‘The child goes with you?’

‘The
woman
does not,’ she snapped, wondering if he would
recognise her. His gaze returned to her with awakening interest,
lingering momentarily on her throwing knife, then on the quiver,
then drifting down to her mount. The crossings-horse gave him pause
and she saw him frown as he tried to place her. Then he appeared to
lose interest again and looked back to Portron.

‘Are you
ley-lit? he asked.

‘I am.’

‘What hard
rations do you have?’

‘A flour sack
of biltong and a half of dried minnows. Two grand rounds of hard
cheese. One of damper flour mixed with dried fruit. A mix of horse
beans and fullen oats for the animals, just the one sack.’

‘That should
suffice. Be down by the pond over there,’ he waved past his tent,
‘at sun-up. And no skirts or bells or bright silks, please.’ He
nodded a dismissal and lay down again. A hand tilted the hat over
his eyes once more.

‘Ah—’ Portron
cleared his throat. ‘May I be asking your name, lad?’

She grinned at
the thought of Master Obsidian-eyes being addressed as lad, but the
man did not seem to react. ‘Storre. Davron Storre. And yours,
chantor?’

‘Portron
Bittle, at your service, of the Order of Kt—’

The hard eyes
emerged briefly once more from under the brim of the hat. ‘Perform
your devotions all you want on this journey, Chantor Portron, but
don’t bother me with them. Is that clear?’

‘Ah, yes, as
you wish, although devotions to the Maker can never be—’ The eyes
disappeared as the hat thunked down under a determined hand.
Portron blinked and retreated.

‘I think you
just met your match, Chantor,’ Keris remarked as they rode away.
‘You won’t get much conversation out of him on your journey.’

‘Alas, I do
believe you may be having the right of it.’ He sighed. ‘And the
pilgrimage will be taking all of two or three months, too. I hope
his heart is not as black as his eyes.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Ah, it’s
all on the palm of the good Maker, blessed be His name. If it’s my
fate to arrive at the Fatherhouse, then arrive I shall. Now what
about you, lass? Which of these guides heading for the Second Stab
will you take?’

‘The one who
leaves earliest,’ she said promptly. She knew any one of them might
recognise her, but the odds were against it. She had a face that
was easily forgotten. As for Ygraine and Tousson, for all their
good points, there was nothing remarkable about their appearance.
It was unlikely that anyone would remember them as Piers’
animals.

She visited
all the guides who were bound for the Second Stability—there were
six of them—and there was not one who showed that he found her
familiar. Two chided her about her ownership of the
crossings-horses, a third tried to buy them from her and a fourth
told Portron it was a threat to stability to have a woman ride one,
let alone own two of the beasts, and what was he going to do about
it? The man closest to having the ten pilgrims he considered
necessary to make the journey profitable estimated that he would be
leaving the day after the next and didn’t mention the
crossings-horses at all, so she added the name Keris Kereven to his
list, and then she and Portron rode off to find a place to pitch
their tents.

That evening,
while Portron was giving an impromptu sermon on the Rule to a group
of fellow campers, she went off to find the Hopen Grat
Chantry-shrine. She was not so much interested in performing
evening devotions as in buying the pilgrim’s pass she needed, and
also in making some ritual kineses for Sheyli. And perhaps for
herself too, for forgiveness for her abandonment of her dying
mother.

You did it
for yourself, Keris Kaylen, admit it.
Because you couldn’t
bear the idea of marrying anyone, least of all Harin Markle.
Because you couldn’t stomach the idea of living in Thirl’s house
for the rest of your life, either. Especially not if he was going
to marry that fluffy little idiot, Fressie Leese. You let Sheyli
persuade you to go because it was convenient
… She wriggled the
end of her nose in an attempt to stop the tears that threatened
her.

Right then she
did not like herself much. And she did not feel very old
either.

She was not
too sure devotions would make her feel any better. Her dislike of
implicit obedience to the Maker’s Rule made her regard all kineses
and the value of the Maker’s forgiveness with deep scepticism, but
she went anyway. Locating the shrine without trouble, she bought
her pass in the Rule Office next door, and discovered devotions
were already in progress in the shrine itself. As the building was
full, she joined the worshippers kneeling on the bare ground
outside. She assumed the attitude of reverent attention: both knees
to the ground, back straight, hands flat to the front of the
thighs, reflecting that it was better outside than inside. The
ground was softer than the stone floor of the shrine, and she could
look around if she was bored.

The front of
the shrine was highly coloured, as were all chantist buildings.
This one had murals of knights fighting off Minions, their hands
outlined in colours as they made their ritual kinesis gestures at
their enemies. She had doubts whether a few kinesis signs would
really scare Minions, but the picture was interesting nonetheless.
Inside, a devotions-chantor was reading the Phrases and
predictably, they were from the Book of Pilgrims. A pleasant smell
of jasmine oil drifted through the crowd, for jasmine was always
used at the evening Prostration devotions.

‘And so it
was,’ the chantor read, ‘that the Maker turned to Knight Batose and
said: “Go thou—and thine—once in thy life, to worship at my shrines
and holy places across the Unstable, for only such a journey will
entitle thee to come to the ordered Table of Paradise in the
afterlife.”

‘ “But,” the
Knight protested, “mine life shall be endangered, and mine children
placed in jeopardy before the maws of the Unstable.”

‘ “Thou hast
the will to choose,” the Maker said, “but this I say unto thee: no
Man nor woman who comes not to worship at a distant shrine shall
sup Order at my Tables after death, unless a child less than twenty
summers—” ’

Stupid
convoluted language,
Keris thought morosely.
Why don’t holy
men ever say anything plainly?
The answer supplied itself,
unbidden.
Maybe it’s because if it was said clearly enough, we’d
know it was nonsense. Why do we have to risk our lives to save our
souls? It doesn’t make sense, and the Maker ought to be
logical.
She sighed and tried not to think that maybe, just
maybe, the Holy Books were not the inspired word of the Maker
speaking through his holiest followers after all, but the ravings
of some mad knight, ensconced in a cave somewhere and suffering the
visions of the insane.

Still, when
the time came for the congregation to perform kinesis, she joined
in with the rest of the gathering, fingers and hands and arms
making the ritual gestures, her body taking up the correct
postures—first on this knee, then that, then both, forehead to the
ground. She did it for her mother, for forgiveness, and finally she
did it hoping that she would survive the crossing. Survive, and
remain untainted. At least this is the service of Prostration, she
thought, and not Abasement. Abasement entailed kineses performed
mostly flat on one’s stomach.

It was dark by
the time the devotions were finished. She began to wonder if she’d
been foolish to leave it so late to return to camp. She and Portron
had pitched their tents a little distance away from the bulk of the
pilgrims, too, at her insistence. The smell from the public pit
latrines at the back of the camping ground had been too much for
her to stomach. Now the darkness of the unlit town and the rough
paths that led to the tents was disturbing. Most people abroad
moved in groups, with lanterns, and she had not thought to bring
even a candle from her pack.

She set off,
walking fast, glad of her trousers and boots and regardless of the
hardened ruts underfoot, trying not to think of the stories she had
heard about the Unbound who served the Minions of Chaos. ‘They like
the dark,’ Piers had said once. He’d been trying at the time to
convince her that the Unstable was no place for a woman Unstabler.
‘They kill for pleasure, but never cleanly and never fast. The
younger the victim the better, because to Carasma the death of the
young is the greatest insult he can bestow on Creation. What they
do to women, especially the young ones, is the worst. Sometimes
they don’t have human shape, but that doesn’t stop them taking what
they want first…’

When she
reached the foot of the rise where most of the pilgrims were
camped, she saw a group of people ahead on the track. There were
both men and women, with several lanterns among them, and they were
standing talking. None of them looked her way, and without a light
she knew she was almost invisible anyway. The scene looked ordinary
enough. It was the voice she heard that stopped her dead.
Thirl.
Thirl giving her description, right down to the
horses and the colour of her tent.

‘No,’ someone
replied, ‘we haven’t seen anyone like that. A thief, you say?
Fella, your chances of finding a particular thief in Hopen Grat are
as slim as a flatworm.’

‘Perhaps.
Should you see her, don’t tell her I’m looking, eh?’

Keris waited
and watched in silence, shivering. The group moved off towards the
tents. Thirl angled his way up the hill away from her and, she was
thankful to note, away from where she was camped with Portron. She
hastened on her way.