Wild Magic (68 page)

Saro’s hands closed over the smooth wood of the staff, and allowed the expected wash of memories and experiences to flood through him – sunlight and dappled ground; a young man; an old man; the pain of a birth; a powerful sense of protectiveness, a deep connection with the world. Against the skin of his chest, the death-stone began to pulse with a pale green light . . .

‘Run away,’ Saro said to the boy, and his own voice sounded strange to him, deeper and slower and from a long way away, as if it were being drawn out of him by an unseen hand. And Falo must have seen something too, for the boy’s eyes went wide and then he turned and sped away down the riverside track.

Fingers gripped his arm and he started, shocked by a sudden chill. The sorcerer took his hand off Saro as if burned. His gaze was violet, intense.

‘The stone . . .’ he breathed. ‘Saro – do not use the stone—’

Too late. Saro’s fingers had already closed over the pendant. As the first soldier charged at them, he drew it out and pointed it at the man. A coruscating light haloed the stone, sending out darting rays and sparks. The soldier’s horse shied and whinnied and banked abruptly to the left so that the man lost his stirrups and fell head first into the river. The horse galloped past them with its eyes rolling. Seeing all this, the second soldier hesitated. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, Saro could make out each mark made by the claws Bëte had raked down the horse’s flank; then the soldier had wrestled his sword out and was shouting at them. Saro’s fingers burned with sudden heat which travelled the length of his arm, through the shoulder joint and into the muscles and bones of his neck and skull. He closed his eyes and wished the man away. There was a cry; a thud. When he opened them again, the soldier lay unmoving, his sword arm flung wide; the weapon spun away across the ground.

He turned, shocked, to say something to the sorcerer, but Virelai was off and running for the cover of the trees in the wake of the nomads. He was on his own. When he turned back, two more soldiers were on the hillside. They must have seen the events which had overtaken their fallen comrades, for their movements were cautious: then, instead of hurling themselves down the slope, they wheeled their mounts about and headed back uphill. For a few seconds their silhouettes were visible against the sky, then they disappeared.

Saro let go of the pendant. His head ached and his stomach felt hollow with dread. The first man he reached was plainly dead, his eyes rolled up into the sockets to reveal yellowed corneas and the barest rim of iris. The second man, however, was floundering around in the shallows of the river in an uncoordinated fashion. ‘Help me!’ he spluttered at intervals. ‘I’m drowning!’

Saro hauled him out onto the bank and he lay there coughing and wheezing and throwing up trickles of water and bile. The contact rendered a number of images – a sensation of exhaustion and angry boredom, heat and dust and thirst; aches from the saddle; a faint disgust as a woman’s body burned in a pyre, face down, her heavy peasant shoes jerking convulsively; fear as a huge black cat loomed out of undergrowth causing him to stab down again and again with his sword . . .

Saro took his hands away. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

The soldier blinked. ‘Deserter,’ he croaked, pointing at Saro. ‘Sent to bring you back. And the pale man, as well. Got to be punished, that’s what Lord Tycho said. Example to others.’ He coughed again, wiped the resultant ejecta away with the back of his hand. ‘Supposed to bring the cat back, too.’ He paused, laughed. ‘Trouble is, no one told us how big the damn thing was!’ He hauled the leg of his ripped breeches up to inspect the damage. ‘See?’ he said.

Flaps of skin hung like ribbons on his thigh. The water had made the blood thin and red again where it had been starting to coagulate. It pulsed out of the wound, staining the dry grass beside him.

‘Still, I got the bloody thing, I think,’ he said with some satisfaction. ‘Right in the side.’ He thought about this for a moment, then: ‘Got a bandage?’ he asked.

Saro stared at him blankly. Was Bëte dead? He had heard no roar since the first shriek on the hillside; no other sound from her at all. Despair came to him again, as dark as a cloud. He got up and walked away, leaving the soldier where he was, looking after him with a confusion bordering on outrage.

The stallion, Night’s Harbinger, stood a little way downriver with his head dipped into the water, drinking unconcernedly. But where was Virelai? Saro walked into the bushes where he had last seen the pale man, ducking under branches, stepping over roots and brambles. He found the sorcerer curled up at the foot of a huge rowan, clutching his knees to him and rocking to and fro like a distressed child. When he saw Saro standing over him, he looked terrified. ‘Please don’t use the stone on me,’ he begged.

Saro shook his head. ‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘I’ll never use it again.’ He removed the pendant from around his neck. ‘Here, you take it. I do not want it: I never wanted it – all it has been to me is a curse.’

But Virelai scrabbled away from him till his back was up against the tree and there was nowhere else for him to go, his features set in a feral rictus. ‘Oh no,’ he protested. ‘Not me.’

Saro frowned. ‘Then let us bury it here, or cast it into the river: then no one can use it.’

The sorcerer shook his head. ‘Others may find it, and that would be worse.’

‘Are you sure you will not take it?’

Virelai looked appalled. ‘Not I,’ he said. ‘It is too strong for me.’

Defeated, Saro put the thing on again and tucked it back under his tunic. ‘Let us go and find Alisha, then,’ he said at last. ‘I think the soldiers have gone.’

When they emerged out onto the riverbank again, the wounded soldier was no longer where Saro had left him, and neither was Night’s Harbinger. But the ground was churned where he had last seen the stallion: it looked as if the beast had taken to its heels and headed after the nomads.

At a bend in the river, they found the caravan. Or the remnants of it, at least.

Of the four wagons, two were upright and seemed intact; the other two lay on their sides with their wheels spinning. Three yeka lay where they had fallen, necks or legs broken; so did the two old men. Elida, they had pinned to a tree with their lances. She sagged, spiked through the torso and shoulders, and twice through the legs. It looked as if someone had made a poor attempt to cut off her head, then abandoned the task.

Falo lay splayed out on the ground. He was covered in blood. Some distance away, his severed arm still clutched a long club, the end of which was matted with blood and hair. Of his mother there was no sign.

Saro fell to his knees at the boy’s side and gently turned him over. His face was untouched, his skin as clear as a spring morning. There was a slight smile upon his lips, as if he were asleep and dreaming of something pleasant. He was quite dead.

Virelai began to cry. Great howls of rage and sorrow welled up inside him and burst out into the air like bats out of a cave. He ran here and there, pushing at the wagons, pulling blankets and clothing and wet washing out of them in case Alisha was somehow hidden by them. Saro watched him, feeling dead inside. It came as no surprise to him when the soldiers reappeared: ten of them, most armed to the teeth, three with arrows trained on him. Their leader walked forward, brandishing his sword in one hand, and pushing Alisha forward with the other. The man with the wounded leg sat astride the stallion. Saro wondered how he had managed to subdue the horse sufficiently to mount him, then saw the cruel way the halter had been knotted around the beast’s mouth and neck.

‘That’s him!’ the wounded man – Gesto – cried, indicating Saro. ‘He’s got a magic stone on a pendant – he killed Foro with it: I saw him!’

The captain looked wary. This was what Isto had reported, too, and he trusted Isto’s word beyond Gesto’s any day of the week.

‘Take off that pendant you’re wearing and throw it down in front of me!’ he shouted to Saro. ‘Carefully, or I’ll gut the woman.’

Alisha’s hair was in wild disarray and there was blood on the side of her face. Someone had bound her hands roughly: even at this distance he could see with a terrible clarity how the cords cut so tightly into the skin above her wrists that her hands had gone purple.

Something in him made him want to use the stone, to sear them in its awful heat, to scour them from the face of Elda. All of them: Alisha, Virelai, the stallion; even himself. Such destruction, such oblivion seemed for a moment appallingly attractive, a blessed relief, a perfect escape. Then the moment passed. With shaking hands, he removed the pendant, and cast it down on the ground in front of the troop’s captain, where it lay on the grass with the cold, white, killing light dying out of it.

They kept their captives well bound and separate on the ride north, for fear they would somehow make spells between them; for if a simple stone could kill a man without leaving a mark on him, who knew what other resources these renegades might draw out of thin air? The pendant lay swaddled inside the captain’s saddlebag, wrapped first in silk – the blue kerchief his daughter had solemnly bestowed upon him when he was sent to the Jetra garrison – and then in a woollen mitt, in memory of the old verse his grandmother used to recite when putting away her special things, which had fascinated him as a child:

If it had been a calf which had donated its hide to make the leather of his saddlebags then it was probably the oldest and ugliest calf in history, Captain Vilon mused; but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances.

No one had ever carried old Festia Vilon off to the pyres; but she might be less lucky in these times. His mother did not seem to have inherited Festia’s wild imagination, if imagination it was; but he suspected that if
he
were to delve into strange practices himself, matters might be different, for beneath his fingers the old woman’s artefacts had buzzed and throbbed as if alive. He knew what was inside – his long-dead grandfather’s fingerbones, some pieces of crystal and two soft, amorphous lumps of yellow metal reputed to have come from another land and another time – keepsakes, more than charms, which the old woman took out and stroked and muttered over every day, which seemed to keep her happy and did no one any tangible harm. But the memory of that odd sensation was why he had no intention of touching the Vingo lad’s pendant himself.

The soldier he had sent to retrieve the thing had refused, until he had held a dagger to the man’s jugular; but the stone had done nothing at all, just lain in the trooper’s trembling, sweaty palm like the harmless, insensate thing it most probably was in all but a witch’s hands.

Sitting astride the dead man’s horse, his hands bound and a smothering bag tied over his head in which someone had recently kept an overripe cheese (some nonsense about the searing power of a witch’s eyes) Saro wished for death. Clutching Virelai’s arm when the soldiers had appeared had undone him entirely, for the chaos of panic which had churned through the pale man had travelled swiftly through the contact between them and swept him screaming away beneath its awful tide, made him limp and lifeless, unable to defend himself, let alone anyone else. Even now he could still ‘see’ the images which had filled the sorcerer’s mind: Virelai himself flayed and tortured over his loss of the cat; thousands of nomads set upon wheels of fire or pressed beneath great stones, as if their magic was some essence within them which could thus be extruded.

And this was not the worst of it.

Back in himself again, Saro knew the true depths of despair. What happened to him, to Virelai; even to the martyred nomads was nothing in comparison with what lay in store for Elda. He had had an intimation of the horrors to come: when old women and beardless boys could be hacked down and tormented without conscience or reprisal, the world was already fatally tainted, poisoned, awry. Power in the wrong hands – no, he corrected himself, recalling the ease with which he had erased the soldier’s life – in
any
hands, was an abomination. And now the pendant was travelling north to Jetra where it would be taken to the Lord of Cantara, complete with reports of its lethal abilities, and everything he had seen – the terrible scouring of the world – would surely come to be. And yet it was not that previous nightmare which haunted him now: it was not Tycho’s face which he saw gloating over the death-stone, its virid rays making a ghastly mask of his avid, moonlike face; but Tanto Vingo’s: his brother’s.

‘How can I bear to see the future unfold, and know I could have prevented it?’ he thought miserably. ‘Lady Falla, if you hear me, if you truly are in the world, prove it to me and take my life now. Snuff me out like a candle’s flame and let me pass into the darkness, for I wish to exist no longer.’

He waited, silent beneath the suffocating hood; but his prayer remained unremarked and unanswered.

Thirty-one

Sanctuary

‘Are you quite mad?’

The voice which hissed in his ear made him leap more violently even than the hand which grasped his shoulder with fingers of iron. Caught in the act of pitching his latest victim over the stern, Fent Aranson whirled around to confront his discoverer.

Aran Aranson’s eyes were dull with horror and set in deep black rings born of exhaustion; but a grim light flickered in them, like the embers of a peat-fire. He stared from the pale, narrow face of his son out into the dark, spooling waters of their wake. There was no chance for the fallen man; the waves had closed over Bret Ellison’s head and he was well on his way to Sur’s feasting table now.

‘I knew it was you,’ he said quietly. ‘I have known for days. Ever since we lost Tor Bolson, though I never seemed to be watching at the right time to see it with my own eyes. I have kept asking myself why I am cursed in this way, but for that I can find no answer. Tell me, Fent, why have you murdered these men?’

Instead being weighed down by fear and guilt, Fent shone as if lit with an inner light at the chance to talk about his crimes. His pale skin glowed like the moon itself and crazed blue starlight shot from his eyes.