Isles of the Forsaken (31 page)

He paid no attention till she came close enough that he could see the silver hair beneath her hood. Then, “Blessed guardians!” he exclaimed. His round face and moustache had a kindly look, but he was Torna, and obviously uncomfortable with her identity. Spaeth laid a hand on the panther’s back, feeling the sharp shoulder bones beneath the fur. It gave her courage.

“Will you take a passenger, Captain?” she asked.

“That depends, lass. Where are you bound?”

“To Tornabay.”

He frowned. “Not many of your kind there. Why do you want to go?”

“I won’t ask your business if you don’t ask mine.”

He glanced uneasily up the wharf. “Don’t you have a bandhota?”

“No,” she said.

“Then who’s going to pay your passage?”

It had not occurred to her that he would ask for payment. She had never paid for anything in her life. She didn’t even know how people got money.

Reading her silence, the captain shifted closer and lowered his voice. “There’s a way you could pay me.”

Fearing he was going to ask for dhota, she said sharply, “What?”

“Don’t be alarmed. All I want is a pint of your blood. The real article sells for a good price in Tornabay.”

“Blood? It’s worthless alone.”

“Ah, but they don’t know that, do they? It’s been a generation since most of them saw a dhotamar.”

There was something deeply distasteful about the bargain. Spaeth’s hand fell to Ridwit’s back, and clenched on the loose neck fur. Ridwit looked up at her assessingly. “Squeamish?” she said.

Spaeth drew a deep breath. If these were the dirty waters she would have to swim in, then better to dive than dabble. “All right,” she said. “You can have your blood. Where’s a knife?”

“No, no, give it to me when we arrive,” he said. “It has to be fresh, you know.”

A feeling of contempt for him, for herself, for the whole world pressed round her like a choking cloud. She stepped aboard the boat, dragging part of the dark with her. She glanced back at the captain before going below, and saw him looking after her with an expression of foreboding.

It gave her a surging sense of power.

“He feared me, Ridwit,” she said when they were below deck. “He looked like a cold wind had blown through him.”

The cat grinned. “Nice, isn’t it?”

Spaeth knelt, so that her face was level with Ridwit’s amber eyes.

“The Lashnura are flawed, Ridwit. We are not fit guardians for the isles.”

“You’re right,” the panther said.

*

The lamp cast a sickly yellow glow across Goth’s face, but he did not notice it. He lay with his eyes closed, longing for sleep.

He was losing his battle to stay out of the black pit. Hunger gnawed at him constantly, but food had turned sickening. His nerves were in a state of hyper-exhaustion. Everything hurt, even trivial things. Even staring at the wall, because he had to be inside himself.

It did no good to regret the foolishness that had brought him to this state. He had begun to give dhota too long ago, when he was sure of his ability to conquer himself. By steeping himself in many, he had thought no one could capture him. He could achieve compassion and detachment at once—detachment from the individual and commitment to the common essence of humanity. In that state of engaged disengagement, he had hoped to experience the seed of the divine in them all.

It had proved far different in practice. No matter how often he gave dhota, there were always individuals who had a special hold on him, who tempted him into particular rather than generic love. That weakness had trapped him into causing pain instead of curing it. And now he was paying the price.

The blackness inside his eyelids swirled and shifted, forming a scene, and he realized he had slipped through the fabric of reality without leaving his self behind. He stood at the top of Mount Embo and saw all the Forsakens below him, transformed. A mist from the east was covering the islands one by one, blotting out their colour, dulling the sparkle of the waves. The sea became a thick, reeking swamp, and the vapours that rose smelled of despair.

“You see what your world has become,” a voice said.

It came from below him. He looked down at the cinders beneath his feet. He could see through them, into the bowels of the mountain. A light was there: a dazzling, dangerous glow that churned and slithered, chained by the waning power of mora. A narrow head rose from the lava nest, looking at him with jewelled eyes.

“You need us,” the firesnake said. It was the only vivid thing left in the world. Goth stared, mesmerized by its beauty and danger, his pain momentarily gone.

“You need the Mundua,” it said. “We can free you.”

“No,” Goth said, as he had been taught.

“If you free us,” the firesnake said.

He saw the new world he could create: one that glistened with fire and gold, and roared with cleansing heat. The moral fetor that was Tornabay could be cauterized from the world.

“No,” he said.

“Fool,” the firesnake answered. “We will be free without you, then.”

Something was shaking him. He forced his eyes open, onto the hatefully familiar little room in Tornabay palace. A soldier stood at his bedside.

“You are to come with us,” the man said too loudly. He was uncomfortable with his task.

Goth sat up, blinking, trying to collect the scattered pieces of his mind and lock them up in his body again. As he rose, the ground quivered under his feet. He put a hand on the stone doorjamb and said, “Quiet.” The rumbling faded.

The corridors of the palace were quiet; it was just past daybreak. The two soldiers escorting him set a fast pace, heading into a part of the building Goth had not entered up to now. It had been recently remodelled. The dark, musty corridors had been broadened, lightened, and furnished; the archaic Torna motifs had been stripped from the walls; the thick, stocky pillars had been replaced with shapely, fluted columns; all irregularities had been smoothed out and made symmetrical. It was a more Inning place now. Goth felt the lid of the safe box-world of logic close over him. Here, everything was shaped like a diagram. These straight lines and perfect circles would never admit a breath of duality or serendipity. Dream and luck were locked outside. Here, there was only one answer for every question.

They ushered him into a long, high-ceilinged room paneled in walnut. One of the walls was pierced by tall, arched windows looking out onto an open square. The main part of the room was filled with rows of empty wooden benches facing a raised dais with a towering lectern and adjoining seats. In the wall behind the altar-like stage was a circular window with leaded panes arranged so as to converge in the centre, like a spider’s web.

The board floor made the soldiers’ synchronized footsteps loud as they led Goth down the central aisle to a railing at the front of the room. A single Inning—a small, neat man in spectacles—was sitting there at a clerk’s desk, reading some papers. One of the soldiers said, “Sir!” to attract his attention.

The Inning jotted a note on one of his papers, then looked up. Behind the glasses, his eyes were ice-blue. He said, “Wait outside, please.” The soldiers saluted and left.

When the door had boomed shut at the other end of the room, the Inning said, “I am Admiral Corbin Talley.”

“I am—” Goth paused for a second, uncertain who he was in this setting. “Goran son of Listor,” he finished.

The admiral had noticed his hesitation. Looking at the man, Goth doubted there was much he didn’t notice. The mora that radiated from him was of piercing intelligence and force of will. But there were complex undercurrents, intriguingly hidden. The feeling was almost tactile: here was an intense nature barricaded behind walls of frigid reserve.

“You had an Inning education, I am told,” Talley said, still appraising him.

“Yes. Long ago.”

“Then you know what this place is.”

“Your temple of justice.”

“Well put. This is the heart of Inning, and all our acts and institutions radiate out from here. We are a lexarchy: a government not of kings or parliaments, but of laws. In our land, courts are the ultimate authority. It is this system which will be our greatest gift to your people, when the proper time has come.”

“A cruel gift,” Goth said, looking at the spiderweb window.

“A demanding gift,” Talley corrected. “A gift which frees men to be responsible for their own actions, their own destinies. Inning law recognizes no mysterious forces, no fates, no gods. The cleverest and most industrious create their own good fortune. The violent and heedless suffer the consequences. We ourselves make whatever meaning there is in our lives.”

“And you find this freeing?” Goth asked. “What if the wind blows up and sinks your fleet tomorrow—where will you turn?”

“It will be my own fault for not having foreseen such an event. I will have no gods to blame, but I also will not have to rely upon gods to set it right. I have the power to rectify all wrongs.”

“Then you have taken on a heavy burden.” In the silence that followed, Goth felt the mountain coiled in impotent fury beneath his feet. It took more than law to bind some forces, and the people who became their tools.

Talley rose and turned around to face the judge’s tall pulpit, his hands clasped behind him. “Of course,” he said, “I speak of ideals. The reality is rather different.”

He walked over to the railed-in box where witnesses stood to give testimony, and turned to face Goth. “You called this room a temple. You were right, of course. Here is where we have our priests and robes and ritual. We put our high shaman up there on that throne, and intone our liturgy. It’s all a grand masque, a performance to fool the ignorant into awe. It’s better than force at keeping the peace, and cheaper. But if I had my way, I would strip off all the rigmarole and bare it down to its abstract essence.”

“What essence is that?” Goth asked.

“Justice. The provable, objective, empirical principle of justice.”

His face was like a carving—severe, planar. “It is a principle, not a reality,” he continued. “An ethical principle so demanding, so rigorous, that the corrupt humans on this earth can scarcely comprehend it, much less frame their lives by it.”

“I do not believe we are all so corrupt,” Goth said.

Talley gave him a searching look. “You do not know as much about the race as I, then.”

Goth half-smiled at the hubris of this, but it was a bitter smile. Perhaps the man was right, and a long lifetime spent steeping himself in other humans had produced no knowledge at all. He said, “But if you are right, and we are all corrupt, then how can we presume to judge one another?”

“That,” said Talley, “is the central lie all the trappings of law were created to hide. If I could find just one genuinely good man in this world, then I could rip down all this mummery, burn the very courts; they would no longer be necessary. But that day will not come. There are no good men. Many are called good, but they all have some taint of pride, or self-indulgence—elementary faults I even deny myself. They told me you were a good man.”

He had come face to face with Goth, only the rail between them. His eyes held such a demanding expectation that Goth felt dwarfed. Talley went on, “You have been represented to me as a man who can create just kings and topple pretenders; who can see into hearts and declare who is fit to lead. You can sort the deserving from the merely ambitious, the false from the sincere. You can assay the gold in men’s hearts, and refine them into saints.”

Goth could no longer stand the look in those eyes, the sense that he was facing a hunger that almost matched his own. “I fear I must disappoint you,” he said, looking away.

“Don’t worry, I’m used to it,” Talley said with a brittle, belittling humour.

Slowly, Goth said, “Your belief is in justice. Ours is in a thing called mora. Our teachings hold that in life, a person accumulates pain in his or her soul. Every harm we have suffered is still with us in some way. The scars make us stiff and unsupple; they cut off ways of moving and acting that we might otherwise be capable of.”

“What does this have to do—”

“Let me finish. An unhealed person is a dangerous thing. The unhealed are susceptible to hatred and unreason; they are not truly free. The Adaina call the forces of imbalance the Mundua and Ashwin. However you think of them, they are real. They are always on the thresholds of our minds, waiting to seize control through the inroads of our pain and disappointment. That is why dhota exists: not just to cure, but to keep the forces of imbalance powerless, by robbing them of human collaborators.

“Ordinarily, an unhealed person is only a danger within his or her sphere. But a person with stature, someone fit to lead, affects us all. An unhealed leader becomes a terrible node of imbalance, a tool to destroy not just himself, but the world.

“That is why we believe leaders must pass through dhota-nur. Just as dhota erases present pains, so dhota-nur strips from a person’s soul all the scars that could be inroads of imbalance. An Ison must be released from the bondage of pain. He or she must become a truly free being.”

Talley studied him in silence for several moments. At last he said, “If what you say were true—if there were a magic ritual to free a leader from evil—then it would be a pernicious thing. A leader who cannot bear to do small evils in order to bring about great goods is impotent.”

Frowning, Goth said, “That can be true. But acts are neutral things; they are never intrinsically wrong, in all cases. There are only acts driven by pain and those that are not.”

With a slight, cold smile, Talley said, “Let me show you something.” He opened the gate in the rail between them and gestured Goth to follow him to the window. Outside lay an open market square, deserted except for a few figures hurrying through the hazy air. “Down there,” Talley pointed.

Below them lay a raised wooden platform. Goth’s fingers tightened on the windowsill when he saw that two sharpened stakes stood upright on the execution stage, each with a naked human body impaled on it. The stakes had been thrust right through the men’s bodies, up their spines. One of them hung limp and senseless, the tip of the stake protruding from the skin at his neck. But the other one was moving. As Goth watched, the victim’s head rolled back, his mouth stretched open in unendurable agony.