Wild Magic (29 page)

Is this truly the end, does it happen so simply? Stupid: a stupid error – I never saw his second blade.

Why were we fighting this battle, anyway? Was not the rumour that we had won the war yesterday at Talsea?

Should have blocked that last thrust and gone left. If I fall, I will be trampled. Hold the cantle, hold tight. Why cannot I feel my fingers?

Is that a crow up there, circling; or a gull? My eyes are getting so bad. Who will oversee the harvest? Can Pali be trusted to run the estate?

Ah, Falla, now I know what pain means.

Will I never see my Corazon again . . . my sons . . . my beloved hounds?

Is this all there is?

A thin, keening cry reverberated from one wall of the helm to the other, growing ever louder, like the clang of the Crier’s bell.

He felt darkness and blessed silence reach out for him. Something in him then rushed to embrace that quiet place which beckoned; but hands fell upon him and the images changed from those of war and death to concern and distress. Apart from one, light touch, a mere brush of fingers on the skin of his neck. A voice sounded quite clearly in his head.

‘You see, brother, what I can do? I will have you yet.’

Then there came a babble of noise, followed by a brief sensation of tugging and a moment of acute discomfort; and at last the helmet was off and all the images fell away.

Fourteen

The Eternal City

Virelai had dreamed of entering the Eternal City ever since he had come across a tiny black etching tucked away between the pages of a treatise on the anatomy of dogs which he had purloined late one night from the Master’s study. Neither concept – ‘dog’ nor ‘city’ – held much meaning for him at that time, since he had not yet been introduced to the miraculous viewing contraption in Rahe’s secret chamber and therefore had seen neither any place beyond the icy wastes of Sanctuary nor any creature other than Bëte: but he had been fascinated by the detailed pictures of flayed skin and lurid organs and the very idea that such peculiar component parts might be comprised in a single living thing; and then the sketch of the city had fluttered out of the book and landed on the floor at his feet.

At first, he had not been sure what he was looking at: a great array of blocks and curves, spikes and arches shimmered in one half of the picture and were repeated in sharper, inverted form below. He had picked up the parchment to examine it more closely and only eventually, after turning it around and around and around, had he realised that he had been looking at the image upside-down and that rather than offering him an abstract pattern, the picture was of some sort of citadel, carved from the living rock on which it stood, a citadel which stood on the edge of a lake so that its spires and crenellations, its arches and roofs were reflected in the water below in a perfect echo of the structures above.

Something about the picture pleased him immensely: something about its balance and symmetry seemed at once transcendent and reassuring, though he had no words for these concepts, either. The image had haunted his nights ever since, so that time and again in a dream in which he scurried about the corridors of Sanctuary, he would find himself standing suddenly at the towering carved gate in the etching, gazing up at its vast door, drawn by the mysteries he sensed within.

Now, here he was, barely a mile from that very place, negotiating a steep defile through a tangle of boulders and thorn bushes, with his thighs and backside aching fiercely from the unrelenting jolt of the little nag his new masters had put him on; and rather than being filled with anticipation, he had never felt so uncomfortable in all his existence. Even after five days of riding he had still not mastered the beast. He had never sat astride any animal before: when driving the yekas, it had always been from the safety of the wagon; but Tycho had been characteristically unsympathetic. To take in every possible rallying point on the way between Forent and Jetra and still arrive in time for the Council meeting, it was necessary to take the fastest route, which involved such rocky terrain and dense forests, narrow tracks and steep tors that any sort of wheeled vehicle was out of the question; so Virelai had been forced to strap Bëte’s wicker box onto one side of the pannier they had slung over his animal – a bad-tempered pony with a dirty white coat and virulent yellow teeth, which it liked to show a lot – and his grimoires on the other, and then clambered into the saddle, where he had sat for the past few days, feeling as precarious as a perched block ready to tumble off down the hillside at any moment. There were times when he thought he would be able neither to walk nor sit properly ever again.

The cat, however, and with its usual perversity, had made no complaint. If anything, the rocking of the horse seemed to lull it into a hypnotised doze: he had not heard a peep out of it during the journey (though getting it out, and then back in, to the box when they made their scheduled stops along the way was a different matter). Virelai almost envied it its comfortable captivity, its capacious rug-lined box. He was just thinking this when the nag stumbled on a loose stone and attempted to catapult him from the saddle. He lost the reins immediately and grabbed wildly at the beast’s mane. The girth slipped. When, a moment later, he opened his eyes, he found himself hanging upside-down beneath the nag’s sweating belly, gazing down across the plain at the very image of the Eternal City he had first seen on the Master’s parchment etching.

The Vingo clan had travelled to the Eternal City across the Altan Plain, skirting the rocky defiles of the White Peak and crossing the Golden Mountains at Gibeon, where Fabel had settled a small debt (which meant putting off another creditor for a little while), and stayed overnight at the Three Ladies Inn, reputed to have been a notorious brothel in the time of Lord Faro – as Tanto reminded everyone with glee – but was now known far and wide for the excellence of its food and wine. ‘We deserve one night of luxury,’ Favio had declared after his brother had protested the expense, ‘after three days on the road.’

Even after downing several glasses of the rich red vintage for which the region was renowned, Saro found it impossible to sleep. Being forced to share a room with Tanto did not help, although his brother, exhausted by the jolting of the wagon and by the effort it had required to sink three bottles of the most costly wine in the establishment, was snoring loudly. The episode with Platino’s helmet seemed to have sensitised Saro even more to the echoes around him: he could sense the thousand lives that had previously touched the bed on which he lay. Many had done far more than merely sleep there, of course. The imprints they left behind, as if ingrained in the wood of the furniture itself, were blurred and manifold, but sufficient to prevent his rest. Instead, he sought the quiet of the stables and spent that night with the horses: their memories were short and their lives simple; and even Night’s Harbinger, high-strung as he was, caused him no disturbance.

The next morning, as they took the old trade road that wove through the foothills where the Golden Range debouched onto the Tilsen Plain, they spied a nomad caravan, moving with slow grace across the infinite grasslands. Some ponies grazed nearby, untroubled by the passage of the Wandering Folk and overhead a flock of the region’s geese streamed effortlessly past, their long necks outstretched, their long wings beating the air. The rest of their entourage paid far more attention to the latter than to the distant nomads: Jetran geese were fine sport, and produced the feathers which the great fletchers used to flight their most expensive arrows – Tanto was loudly holding forth on the subject. Saro shaded his eyes against the heat haze and concentrated on the Wanderers. He counted only five wagons and less than a dozen yekas, which must surely represent only the vanguard of the travellers. He scanned the horizon for the rest, having read that the nomads travelled in great caravans often consisting of half a hundred wagons and thrice as many of the shaggy great beasts that pulled them. Certainly, the troupe he had witnessed arriving at the Allfair conformed to this description; but he had heard in recent months that these huge caravans were splintering into smaller groups in an attempt to be less conspicuous, to be able to melt away into the landscape in times of trouble. Persecution was rife; but to travel in so small a group surely offered no protection at all. If the five wagons were outriders, there was no sign of their companions in any direction that he looked. Had they started out with more? And if so what had become of them? With a shudder, he remembered the rotting, mutilated bodies they had passed on the riverbank south of Pex on their journey back from the Allfair and found himself praying again that little Guaya was not amongst the dead.

Above the startling blue of the water soared red and ochre walls; red and ochre reflections shimmered back out of the lake.
Jetran blue
, Virelai (now upright and with the girth tightened and the reins gripped firmly in his fists) thought with a sudden shock of recognition as he remembered the exotic names on the pots of ink stacked on Rahe’s study shelves. Shadows of umber and violet constrasted sharply with the sun-washed stone, exaggerated the details of the carvings, the arrowslits and the caryatids. Turreted towers punctuated the walls; ornamented spires pierced the skyline. His mouth fell open. Ahead of him, Lords Tycho Issian and Rui Finco rode on unconcerned, untouched by the magnificence of the view. They had seen Jetra too many times to be captivated by its spell: its presence held little mystery for them now.

As they passed beneath the arch of the Dawn Gate, Virelai nearly fell off his nag again; this time for leaning back too far while trying to concentrate on the complex carvings adorning the gateway. From a distance they had appeared to be little more than a series of interlocking patterns that offered little to him in the way of interpretation, but now that they were closer, Virelai could make out the shapes of figures and creatures; a man grasping the talons of a vast raptor, a woman twined with a cat-headed snake, or possibly a snake-bodied cat; great winged beasts too large for any eagle, if the scale of the horses and yeka that danced around the arch was to be believed – a dragon, then, or some other mythological monster? Virelai wished he had paid more attention to the Master’s books. Some of the carvings remained indistinguishable no matter how hard he stared at them, their details erased as if by a giant’s hand, but most likely sand-blasted by centuries of desert winds.

They had come south via the Blue Peak, over the White Downs, and then had followed the steep valley carved out by the Tilsen River, their passage broken by rest-stops in those towns deemed useful by the lords for stirring up religious zeal. Virelai had gathered audience after audience for Tycho, drawing them out of their own houses by the sudden mysterious need to purchase bread, eggs or goose feathers they did not actually require, while stroking Bëte’s throat to coax yet another Spell of Attraction out of her gullet. When a sufficient number had materialised in the market square there seemed to be no further need for magical intervention, since the sight of so many folk gathered in a public place seemed always to draw others merely out of curiosity and Virelai soon discovered he could fill a decent-sized forum within a third of an hour or less. Then Tycho would begin his rousing orations, alternately working upon the audience’s sympathies (the terrible abduction and likely violation of his only daughter by the barbarians) and stoking their xenophobic tendencies in the name of Falla (liberating the women of the North from the heretical treatment of their men, who kept them scandalously unclothed in the sight of the Lady, to whom they made no obeisance). There was little need for Virelai to add to this volatile mix a Charm of Coercion, but he found himself doing it anyway: Tycho was not a pleasant man to work for, and it was better to be safe than savaged. As areas of settlement became more dense on the approach to the Eternal City, Tycho took to performing three times a day, urging the horses to a gallop between towns, which was why Virelai ached as badly as he did. Everywhere they went they left behind a fermenting stew of bigotry, fanaticism and murderous intent.

Inside the Star Chamber, many of Istria’s ruling lords and their retinues had already arrived and were either milling about, helping themselves to araque and almond biscuits, or were locked in deep discussion. More would arrive as the day lengthened; the Council meeting would begin after First Observance the next day.

Saro stared about him in amazement. It was his first visit to the Eternal City, though he had read about it in a dozen stories and knew well the work of the poet Fano Cirio, who served the Swan at the Jetran court.

Which was, Saro thought, struck for the first time by the final sentiments of the poem, a clever way to coerce payment from the nobles for whom he had created and performed such verse. He gazed around now at those gilded pillars, the fabulous tapestries clothing the walls, the massively carved furniture with its distinctive clawed feet – a trademark of the craftsmen of the White Woods – and the intricate fan-vaulted ceiling fully fifty feet overhead, pinpointed with the constellations of glittering silver which gave the hall its name. It was not surprising that Cirio had been so inspired. Saro himself felt both dwarfed and enchanted. He could feel the age of the place, its ‘great antiquity’ in every detail. The carvings that twined around the pillars and crawled across the walls, slipping under the tapestries and re-emerging around the high windows, were too simple in form to be truly Istrian. Animals and people wove in and out of one another in patterns that on first glimpse appeared abstract, then resolved themselves suddenly, revealing dogs and horses, yeka and winged creatures, hunters and warriors. One particular carved panel caught his eye. On the opposite side of the chamber, a group of men in long tunics, bearing spears carried in elegant parallel, were pursuing a figure which had vanished mysteriously behind one of the tapestries. Just one perfect foot could be seen of the fleeing figure: a slim ankle and the first few inches of calf. The carving intrigued him. He looked around. Behind him, his father and uncle were engaged in conversation with Lord Sestran, and Tanto was taking his ease in their chambers. Saro knew from the brief touch his brother had conferred upon him that Tanto had spied there a particularly attractive bodyslave, and while there appeared to be little he could do in practical terms to avail himself of her charms, he still intended to make some attempt to molest her, so Saro had approached the girl himself before they had come down to the Star Chamber with the intent of warning her clear of his brother, but she spoke no Istrian and only a word or two of the Old Tongue and just whistled and clacked at him in a bizarre fashion that reminded him of nothing so much as the old nomad woman who was Guaya’s grandmother. They had parted in mutual misunderstanding, leaving Saro with the horrible suspicion that she thought he meant to have her for himself. The shadow of that anxiety was with him still as he detached himself from the group of men and crossed the chamber to the tapestried wall. The hanging which covered the running man was especially fine: its field largely of deep crimson, its detail picked out in jewel-like greens and golds. Safflower and desert rose entwined around the feet of Bast and the Lady; great trees blossomed overhead, dropping their creamy petals in their path; birds arrayed the branches, flew between the trees, alighted on the ground; but it was not the tapestry that drew Saro’s attention, but the disembodied owner of the foot. Slipping behind Lord Varyx and a tall thin man with a gleaming bald head, Saro lifted the tapestry a little away from the wall and peered behind it.