Isles of the Forsaken (15 page)

“Go on, preach to the wind!” Spaeth’s voice cut against the flow of the sound, scarring his consciousness. “Tell the night about reason and law!”

Her last syllable was drowned by a peal of wind tuned to the timbre of her voice. She looked up, her triumph drained in an instant. He realized she was afraid.

Mutely he reached out a hand toward her. She ignored him, preoccupied by something in the distance. He summoned all his strength and concentration to say her name.

She turned to him, her face waxy. “You took the risk in coming with me. I cannot help you any more.”

Again the wind echoed her tone, and she flinched. She turned away, and for a moment he thought she was going to leave him alone. He gave a terrified, animal cry. She hesitated, then turned back with an angry exclamation and took his wrist, jerking him to his feet. It was easy to do, for he was light as a fish in a sea of sound. “Hide in the eye!” she shouted, and started up the hill.

He began to follow her, but stopped in confusion. He stood on a chalky white slope, grassless and smooth with wind and age. It curved away into a distance lost in the inky fog. With a shock he realized that what he had taken for a hillside was in reality a vast, undulating field of bone; and what he had taken for an island was the bleached skull of an enormous creature, lying slain in the sea. He looked to Spaeth in wonder, but she was already halfway up the slope to the eyehole that stared up into the blank heavens.

The bone was slick and clammy underfoot. The ridge before him seemed impossibly sheer. He tried to gain a toehold on the smooth surface, but his boot slipped and he fell back. Again he tried, only to slide farther down. He clutched with aching fingers at the bony slope, not daring to look down. Spaeth was far ahead, disappearing up the hill into the fog. He wanted to call her back, but could not make his voice work. Then it occurred to him that his boots were weighting him down. Frantically he tore them off and leaped forward on bare feet.

When he reached the edge of the eyepit, Spaeth was gone. The socket held a darkness dense as liquid. He could not bring himself to step over the edge. As he hesitated, a sucking wind pulled him back. He fell full-length on the bony ground, clutching the orbital ridge as the wind mouthed his body. Pulling against that terrible suction, he edged forward until he hung over the pit. Without allowing himself to think, he threw himself in.

What he landed on he never knew. He lay on his back staring up out of the cavity. The air was cold; he could see his breath. Beyond his hiding place rang the desolate song of the wind, and his bones responded. He struggled not to hear, pressing his hands over his ears and shouting to drown the sound out. He felt he must give way when suddenly the sound grew faint. He looked up to find Spaeth bending over him, her hands covering his ears. She had lent him the brief strength not to hear.

But her face was worn and pale. “Are there gods that protect Innings?” she asked.

“Some of us believe—” he began; but it was too much effort to speak.

“Then pray to them,” she said.

Desperately he wanted to escape from this nightmare, to waken and find himself back in his own world; he saw in her eyes that she wished the same.

“What is happening?” he said.

“I don’t know. We must wait to see if anything finds us here.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Don’t talk. Don’t even think. They can smell thoughts. Just pray.”

She drew away, and he felt part of him draw away with her. He was left attenuated, spun thin and fragile, as if he were all eye. She had stolen all but his power to witness.

As Spaeth stepped back, there was a cold breath of air, and on the edge of the pit above them appeared a condensation of blackness against the black sky. For a moment Nathaway thought it was a large block of stone; then he realized it was breathing. Spaeth flinched when she saw it. A heavy tread jarred the air, and a second shadow appeared on the lip of the pit. Then a third. They were trapped.

Spaeth crouched like an animal at bay. Panic rippled over Nathaway’s skin, for he knew his safety depended on her. With a jolt, her last words came back to him. “Pray,” she had said. He knew no prayers. He had never needed a god before. Now, haltingly, he began to say words, jumbled and desperate at first, a confession of his own smallness against the immensity of the world.

Subtly the scene before him changed. His sense of time was lost, but it seemed as if he could discern some movement. In slow flashes it came to him that Spaeth was dancing. He wanted to stop her, to cry out the urgency of the situation. But her dance had caught the attention of the dark watchers. As her movement took on a circular pattern, they began to follow her. In the flickering light, her shadow danced behind her against the walls of their refuge. Faster they all began to spin, until Nathaway was dizzy with watching them. A vortex began to form in the centre; the current tugged at his life-force, a black magnet attracting all energy to itself. Desperately he fought to keep his heart beating, his mind functioning against that gravitation of energy to the centre.

Suddenly an explosion that had once been a woman swooped into the vortex and erupted upward. The shadows above met it, and Nathaway was blinded by a detonation of the darkness. He had no time to turn away or shield himself. As he lost his hold and fell, his mind grasped onto the only conviction in reach: he still wanted to live.

Harg was deep asleep the next morning when the door crashed back against the wall so hard that dust filtered down from the rafters. Before he could quite struggle awake, four marines pushed into the house, armed for police duty: clubs, handcuffs, and pistols. They scanned the darkened room and saw Harg, then went straight for him. Two of them dragged him roughly from bed, then shoved him across the room and through the door, out into the cold morning air, wearing only the shorts he had been sleeping in.

Two of the marines held his arms, and another stood watch. Without any preamble, the fourth marine, the one whose nose Harg had bloodied, struck him in the mouth so hard that Harg’s jaw nearly came unhinged. This was followed by a blow to the other side of his face that left white spots dancing before Harg’s vision.

The third blow, to his stomach, buckled Harg’s legs, and they let him sink to the ground. Gasping for breath, his mind still careening, he crouched on all fours in the dirt. He could make no sense of what was going on.

“Where is Justice Talley?” the marine demanded.

Harg gaped at him, speechless. One of the others raised his truncheon, so Harg yelled, “I don’t know!”

“You threatened him the other day.”

“What?” Harg said, sounding nearly as stupid as he felt.

“Come on, you piece of brown. He came here last night. What happened then?”

“I never saw him,” Harg said. The marine behind him brought the truncheon down on his bare back. “I swear to you, I was here all night. He was never here.”

The door behind them banged and Tway came flying out into the yard, an old coat wrapped hastily around her nightgown. Fearlessly, she thrust herself between the marines and knelt on the ground beside Harg, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Four against one?” she shouted at them. “Is that your idea of a fair fight?”

The marines stepped back. She went on furiously, “He was in the house all night. I was here. He did nothing but talk and sleep. We would have known.”

All around the landing, the doors of other houses had started opening, and people were collecting to see what was going on. Strobe had come out of the house, and was frowning darkly, his massive arms crossed on his chest. Unwilling to continue with so many witnesses, the marine said to Harg, “If we find out you’re lying . . .”

They marched off noisily in a thuggish clump. Harg’s lip had started bleeding profusely, and Tway pressed a piece of cloth into his hand to stanch it. “Here, come inside. I’ll give you something cold to put on that.”

She led him back in while Strobe stayed outside to talk to the neighbours. Once he had a cold, wet cloth pressed to his face and the bleeding had slowed, Harg said, “What the bloody hell were they talking about?”

Grimly, Tway said, “You men were so wound up in your conspiracies last night, you didn’t know what was going on outside. Probably everyone in the neighbourhood could have answered their question.”

“So the asswipes decided to beat on the one person who didn’t know a thing.” He paused to spit some blood into an empty beer glass by his chair, then looked up at her. “Justice Talley? The Inning?”

In a low, tense voice, she said, “Last night, the elders asked Spaeth to give dhota for Jory.”

This news sent a shock of alarm through Harg. He grasped Tway’s arm hard. “She didn’t do it, did she?” The thought of her, so beautiful and graceful, drooling and twitching with Jory’s injury, was more painful than the beating.

“Well, they brought her to him, and of course you know what happened when she saw him. She wanted to do it.”

“Oh gods,” he groaned, “why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone.”

“There was no need. The Inning found out about it, and barged in. He interrupted the ceremony and Spaeth never finished.”

For once, an Inning had done the right thing. For all the wrong reasons, of course, but at least he had prevented a tragedy. But now he was missing. “Did someone take it out on him?” Harg asked.

“Spaeth,” said Tway significantly. “She was furious with him. The last anyone saw of them, she was leading him up the hill to the Whispering Stones. Later, they saw lights up on the hill. Everyone was too scared to interfere.”

Harg felt queasy with the thought of what that might mean. “She wouldn’t have—” He saw on Tway’s face that they were thinking the same thing. He whispered, “She took an
Inning
into one of the other circles?”

He staggered to his feet to find his clothes.

“Where are you going?” Tway said.

“I’ve got to find out what happened. For one thing, if that Inning doesn’t make it back, there’s going to be a hue and cry from here to Fluminos. For another . . .” He had to find out if Spaeth was all right. He didn’t say it, but Tway understood.

“Wait for me, I’m coming too,” she said.

Ten minutes later, they were walking together up the path to the Whispering Stones. Even from the base of the hill they could see that something had happened there, for the grass was flattened in a circle, as if a whirlwind had stood there. When they reached the top, a dark mood seemed still to hang about it, dimming the morning light, and there was a smell of charring. Harg could not bring himself to cross the invisible circle traced by the stones. He waited while Tway checked inside. Laying his hand on one of the stones, he found it was icy cold.

“The grass in there is all black,” Tway said when she came back out. “But there is no sign of anyone.”

Harg scanned the landscape, and his eyes fell on a gully on the north side of the hill. “Let’s check down there,” he said.

They found Spaeth sitting with her head bowed on her knees. Nearby lay what looked like a pile of clothes, with a telltale shock of blond hair sticking out. As Tway scrambled down the steep bank toward Spaeth, Harg headed for the Inning.

Nathaway’s face was the colour of a cadaver. Quelling his revulsion, Harg knelt and felt for a pulse behind the ear. The Inning’s skin was cold and stiff. For an instant, Harg thought he felt a flutter under his fingers, but it was only his own pulse, racing.

“Don’t be dead,” he whispered to the lifeless body, pressing his hands over the heart as if to warm it with his own body heat. He could feel nothing. Then he picked up a hand, chafing it between his own. “Come back,” he said; but it was useless. He let the Inning’s hand drop.

“Is he dead?” Spaeth was looking at them in a glazed torpor.

Instead of answering, Harg picked up the glasses lying broken on the ground next to the body, folded them, and put them in the Inning’s pocket. Then he stood up.

“What happened?” Tway said to Spaeth.

She looked as if it were taking all her strength to keep her head upright. Her voice was dull and lifeless. “I shot him off like an arrow into space. I thought he would fall to earth again two feet in front of me. He didn’t. It was as if he had been practising with mora for ten years, and had never learned the first thing about it.”

In silence, Tway and Harg looked at the lifeless Inning.

“I hated him.” Now Spaeth’s voice was thick with emotion. “He scoffed at me and at dhota. I wanted him to die in the wastes outside the world. I wanted the Mundua to feast on his liver. But in the end I couldn’t do it. Oh, what an idiot I was!”

What she had done was dangerous beyond description—not just to herself, but to all of them. Calling up the Mundua and Ashwin was an unthinkable act, because once in this circle there was no sure way of getting them out. If it had gotten out of control, the delicate balance on which all the circles rested could have been shattered. They were unspeakably lucky that only one person’s death had satisfied the forces of chaos.

But now . . . Harg sank to the grass, his hands over his face, overwhelmed with the repercussions this insane act would have.

“Harg?” Tway said.

“The Inning’s dead,” he said dully. “They’re going to want someone to blame. You know who that’s going to be.” His back, his ribs, his bruised face all ached with the knowledge of who it would be. But next time it wouldn’t be just a beating. They would have to make an example, provide a deterrent.

He turned to Tway. “I’ve got to get away from Yora.”

She looked horrified. “If you run, they’ll only suspect you the more.”

“If I stay, I’m a dead man.”

“What happened to your face?” Spaeth broke in. She had just focused on Harg for the first time, and she looked starved, spellbound at the sight. “You’re hurt. I’ve got to help you.” She started trying to undo the bandage on her arm.

“Stop that!” Harg ordered her. She paid no attention, but started tearing at the bandage with her teeth, so he caught her wrists and held them so she couldn’t harm herself. For a moment they faced each other, kneeling in the grass, and he saw the raw, uncontrolled longing in her eyes. Then she lunged forward and kissed him on the mouth.