Wild Magic (56 page)

‘But he cannot know who or what she is! No one does.’

‘I do not think,’ Virelai said slowly then, ‘that she even knows herself.’

Alisha considered this. ‘That may have been true for a long, long time,’ she said after a while, ‘but the magic is getting stronger all the time: I sense she is coming back to herself.’

Twenty-six

Wreckage

The fact that he had created these fogs himself and sent them out to haze the boundaries of his world, to veil Sanctuary from the overly-curious, did not improve his temper. But now they were in his way.

He had concocted them in a rage, furious to see ships suddenly bearing down on his hideaway through seas he had always believed to be impassable in the depths of winter, fortified as they usually were with great ramparts and barricades of ice, infinite expanses of fractured, dazzling icefields broken only by treacherous leads and crushing bergs which would loom up like great massifs and move inexorably southwards, ready to crush and sink, to swamp and avalanche the unwary, the unlucky; the trespasser. But somehow, somehow, trespassers were approaching.

He had swung the viewing-crystals in his ice-tower in such a rage that prismatic lights had shot this way and that – violet and gold, turquoise and scarlet – illuminating a chamber left to rot and ruin during his long sleep. Vast white spiders hung in the shady junctures between ceiling and wall, their webs great dusty curtains flecked with chitinous wingcases and discarded legs; the spiders pale ghosts of the monsters he had created in his early days on the island and then lost interest in, as he had so much else in this goddess-forsaken place. And then, suddenly, there, there! Aboard a vessel which had the deep temerity to brave these supposedly uncharted waters, a captain – a tall, vain man with blond braids and an intricate confection of chalcedony at his throat, consulting, of all things, a
chart
.

The crystals could be remarkably precise when he could be bothered to wield them delicately: in the grip of a curiosity so intense it was like a hand around his throat he had flicked the levers a hair’s breadth to left and right, brought the third level of lenses into use for the first time in decades; swore at the dust which clouded them and blasted them clean with a single merciless spell which left them gleaming and painful to the eye. He brought them to bear upon the parchment clutched in the tall man’s hand, adjusted the focus a smidgeon; and stared.

It was like a fist to the gut, a winding; a blow. There, inked in the hand he had so painstakingly taught his student – his one, his only, his beloved boy, his Virelai, greatest creation of them all – was a map which charted with intricate and unstinting detail the watercourses of the Northern Ocean, the way to Sanctuary. It was not entirely accurate, of course: how could it be? All his apprentice had ever had to go on was his own poor attempts to chart his strange and eventful journey to this wild place, and those had been filled as much with fancy as with fact. But somehow, somehow, the boy had woven magic into them – he could sense the spell the thing cast by the way the blond man craned over it, hid it from the view even of his navigator, as if he coveted its every curve and recurve, every line of its windrose and indentation of coastline; every letter of its legend. Some sort of compulsion emanated from it; a kind of delusion. What had he offered them? Rahe wondered, but knew even before the answer had formed in his head.

It would be treasure: gold. It was always gold with men. They were fools for it, made mad by the promise of its rare lustre. Even amidst his rage at the boy’s treason and guile, he could not help but laugh. It was a bitter laugh, as creaky as an old gate: it echoed around the tower-room like a bat in a cave, a dark thing rarely seen in the light. It took him by surprise, this laugh, made him stop abruptly so that a grey silence wreathed the chamber again, and the spiders, which had ventured into the centre of their webs at the sound, as if sensing some form of life, crawled back up their trembling lines into obscurity once more.

‘They will find no gold here,’ he said aloud. His voice was hoarse from disuse and dehydration, but it made the words no less true. There was no gold in Sanctuary; no gold but pyrites, great glittering lumps of it excrescing in the carved-out tunnels and corridors of the fastness. Fake and worthless, brittle and chill. Fool’s gold, the perfect gold for fools. True gold came only from one other source. He, of all beings, knew well where that might be, but his memory did not wish to engage with that knowledge at this time: it shied away like a fretful pony.

There were other ships, too. Some he recognised; others he did not. There were ships, it seemed, wherever he looked! Some were ancient; some the natural storms of the place had dealt with without the need for further interference; others drifted helplessly, lost and rudderless. Some lacked crews; others had ventured too far north and been taken by the ice. He watched in satisfaction as the floes closed in on one stricken vessel and crushed her to splinters while her crew watched hopelessly from their tiny boat. What prospect of survival did they stand in these realms? He smiled and smiled. None, none at all. If the cold did not get them, then storms or hunger or lack of water would carry them off; and madness would come before the end.

Even so, he was taking no chances. Gathering the remnants of his spellcraft, he sent impenetrable fogs out into the Northern Ocean to confuse even the most skilful of navigators and confound the pathetic shreds of magic which Virelai had managed to set into the maps he had made, chilling mists so dense they would swallow any wind that dared to blow near Sanctuary. And so, becalmed and bedevilled, the trespassers gave up their ghosts, their spirits coiling like smoke into the choking fogs, thickening them further, filling them with wails and cries which the uninitiated might take for the forlorn calls of lost seabirds.

The effort it took rendered him insensible for three days, and when he came to, it was in a mire of his own making and the tower-room was filled with foul odours and the echoes of his babbling. He crawled to the viewing platform and searched the myriad vistas in a haze of fury and despair until something had caught his interest and held it, an echo, a vibration. It was way out beyond the fogs which obscured his sight, but it caught at his senses like a cat snagging his sleeve. Something rare and true: obsession and madness, an immense and wasted energy: a reservoir to be drawn upon. He could feel it like a lodestone. He peered and peered, but the fogs he had made were reluctant to disperse. Angrily, he swung the prisms again, and again.

Out on the open sea, a sail: plain and red. An elegant vessel with serpentine lines. Levers creaked and dust flew as more precise lenses were brought into play. There! A tall dark man with a determined face standing at the prow with his hand pressed against his heart. No, not his heart, but something which lay beneath his clothing, nestling out of sight, something he valued more than life itself. Beside him, a giant of a man with a ruined face and a single, tattered ear. And behind him, a thin boy with red hair and wild eyes. A dark rancour burned in those eyes, such an untapped well of it. Suddenly, Rahe felt the old cogs and levers moving not in his hand, but in his head. It was as if providence itself spoke to him out of the origins of all things.

A madman; a giant; a fool
.

The refrain of an ancient verse played over and over in his skull, like a mantra or a spell; or the nonsense of a child’s song:

The skies darkened, heralding a storm out in the world which mirrored perfectly the pressures moving monstrously inside him. He felt suddenly larger than he was, more than himself, a consciousness which yawned over all of Elda. The pressure built, spilled over, flooded out.

Madness was all he had, so madness he sent forth . . .

It was only when the last glow of the maggot-eaten ship had faded from sight that Aran Aranson turned to order the sail set, and found that two of his crew were missing. He scanned the decks for sight of Tor Bolson – a strapping man who always wore a ‘lucky’ scarlet jerkin should not be hard to spot – but he was not amongst the knot of men dispersing amidships, nor was he at his appointed rowing place. It was as he was making a mental knot for the rest of the crew that he realised another was absent, too: a short dark boy who had come from the eastern isles, and who, despite southern slave origins, had a sure hand about the rigging.

‘Urse!’

The big man was at his side at once.

‘Have you seen Tor or,’ he searched his memory, ‘Bran Mattson?’

Urse looked surprised at the question. Then he, too, turned to scan the deck. ‘I saw Bran with Jan and Emer last,’ he said slowly.

Aran identified the Fishey lad at once. Emer Bretison was the best part of seven foot tall: he was hard to miss. Beside him, a slight man with his fair hair in a tight tail was working to swing the yard free of the shrouds. He stepped swiftly down the ship towards them. ‘I’m looking for Bran,’ he said briskly.

Jan stopped what he was doing and regarded his captain blankly. ‘He was—’ He looked to his left, then to his right and frowned. ‘He was standing beside me at the gunwale when we fired the
White Wyrm
,’ he said slowly. His eyes became wider. They were very blue, Aran noticed; the blue of speedwell or forget-me-not and when, as now, they were not quite focused, they made him look both vacant and childlike. Then, as if something had struck him, he spun around wildly, his gaze leaping over his fellow crewmember in something approaching panic. ‘He was with me,’ he started again, ‘and then—’ He turned back to his captain, horrified. ‘He’s gone. But how—?’

Aran’s eyebrows became a single forbidding black line. He turned to Emer. ‘And you?’

Emer shrugged and went back to his task. ‘Maybe he took a nap under the skiff,’ he said provocatively. That Aran had not punished his son for his cowardice and dereliction of duty had not sat well with the rest of the crew.

The Master of Rockfall stared hard at the back of Emer’s head for a few tense seconds. Then, as if deciding not to pursue the remark, he addressed himself to Jan. ‘Say nothing,’ he warned, and ran back to Urse.

The big man gave him an almost imperceptible shake of the head. ‘No one has seen him since before you boarded the
White Wyrm
,’ he said when Aran was in range, though he kept his voice down.

Neither man was under the remaining skiff, nor hidden amidst the supplies and sea-chests. No one was up the mast, wrapped in the spare sailcloth, or trailing in the wake. For a wild moment, Aran had a vision of the mismatched pair – one huge and blond, the other dark and wiry – afire aboard the ghost ship, and pushed the image firmly from his mind. He was the only living man to have set foot on that vessel in many weeks, of that he was certain.

By the time the moon came up it was clear neither Tor nor Bran was any longer aboard the
Long Serpent
. The crew started to speak of evil spirits, things which would suck your soul out of your ears, out through the pores of your skin, gasts which appeared in the form of seductive enchantresses, clothed in weed and shells and sea-haars, which would wrap themselves around you as warm as any land-woman and kiss the life right out of your mouth, every breath and heartbeat. But even gasts and afterwalkers left the emptied-out bodies behind them, and of the two missing sailors there was no trace at all.

Aran sat watch that night, all night, with his back braced against the mast. There was nothing to see outside the ship, star nor moon, nor horizon; for the fogs hung around them, as impenetrable as ever. But it was not spirits that he watched for, nor afterwalkers returned from the dead ship, nor anything which had come out of the sea. Neither coincidence nor supernatural intervention had lost him his crewmen, of that he was sure. And so he sat there, with one hand on the pommel of his dagger and the other balled into a fist, and waited for what the next day would bring.

Sure enough, the morning brought a new freight of horror. In the early hours a second ship sailed through the thinning mists towards them, propelled by neither wind nor oar and haloed by the dawn light like a sundog. Even so, when they had rowed in close enough to grapple the vessel towards them, it was clear that whatever disaster had occurred here was less than supernatural in origin. The stricken ship’s timbers were split and silvered by the elements and within seconds of setting foot on its creaking deck, Urse and his captain could see that its crew were dead, every one. This time, the flesh was still upon the corpses, though it was darkened to a vile purplish-black, dried almost to the point of mummification, blotched and livid where boils had swollen, burst and dried to pits. Their faces were the worst, for the eyeballs – yellow white and crazed as ducks’ eggs left too long in the nest – appeared shrivelled in their sockets and the lids were shrunken and parched and cracked like an old harness. All that remained of their lips were ragged black lines etched against teeth that jutted long and shockingly white from dark and desiccated gums. Their noses, if such they could be termed since barely a knuckle-length remained, were shrunken and withered to obscene and noxious flaps within which the lining showed as black as spent coal. What remained of the rest of their skin was stretched tight as tanned leather across their fog-dewed bones. They lay in heaps, tangled together or curled into fetal shapes, their staring eye-sockets and open mouths testament to the agony of their passing. There was not a single maggot, not a single blowfly aboard the ship. There was still salt-cod and wind-dried meat packed in two unopened kegs, and a dozen or more hard cakes of unleavened bread wrapped in hessian in a chest beside them; but the water casks were as dry as tinder, and a broken sun-still made from a square of sailcloth contained nothing more than a thick crusting of sea-salt.

Urse shook his head. ‘Poor bastards,’ he said with feeling.