Burying the Shadow (17 page)

Rayojini

‘…
who shall tempt
with wandering feet the dark unbottomed infinite Abyss?’

Paradise Lost,
Book II

A summer of drought
was followed by an autumn of unceasing deluge; those that were late
with the harvest watched their grain rotting in the fields. And I,
Rayojini, daughter of Ushas, daughter of a skilled line, found
myself in the waterlogged land of Khalt, wishing myself anywhere,
anywhere
else in the world. What an unfortunate time for the
wanderlust to strike!

Walking north
through the ceaseless downpour, I had need of a new pair of boots.
The rough tracks that, in drier days, served as roads for caravans
heading northwest had been reduced, through the attention of the
elements, to little more than muddy streams, that sucked at my
soggy trouser-legs causing irritating sores, and had destroyed the
leather right off my feet; I was convinced one of my toes was
suffering from a fungus blister. My long, heavy coat - one of my
favourite garments - was thick with mud up to my knees and my
wide-brimmed hat had become distinctly droopy; I’d had to remove
the face-guard netting completely. As for my carryback, it had been
getting heavier and heavier as I trudged along. Next town, I told
myself, next settlement, next cottage by the way...

I had been
travelling without having seen another human creature for three
days now. Naturally, the rain kept people inside, but I had
expected to see some form of life. A ghostly herd of deer had
crossed my path the previous evening - heads down, pelts matted and
furrowed - but other than that, I hadn’t even glimpsed a bird. My
bivouac was still wearing well, thank spirit and will, and I was
tempted to turn my back on the uncomfortable outside world, and bed
down under canvas until the weather cleared. Only the promise of
greater comforts kept me travelling. How I would welcome a roof
over my head, a hot potage, and someone to rub my feet. I struggled
on, resting as little as possible.

I knew it had
been more than a little unwise to venture into this territory,
because it had a reputation for foul weather at this time of year.
I was bitterly regretting my decision now, but summer’s end had
promised balmy, fruity days, and the scent of the ripening plains
had led me out of Truskania by the nose. I had veered away from the
well-trodden track, inspired by a sense of adventure, and had
intrepidly decided to explore lands unknown to me. I had a map,
because no soulscaper worth their life travels without one, and if
it was correct, I should come across a settlement any time now. I
was worried, though, that the scale of the map was deceptive.

In spite of
the discomfort, I was still glad to be away from familiar ground. I
felt as if I’d accomplished some kind of escape, as indeed I had. I
had not felt haunted since my feet had left the western road. For a
while, at least, I was free of my inner demons. Demons? a foreigner
might ask. A soulscaper haunted? Yes; it shouldn’t be mocked. We
are all haunted, every one of us, marked from the day of our
ascension into the craft. Hag-ridden, in fact. I am talking of
guardian-pursuers, those ever-active voices from our inner selves
who, once invoked, never shut up. During my childhood, they had
been a source of comfort and reassurance, but once I reached
puberty, they turned into an invasion from which I could never
escape. Even in my most secluded moments, I was never truly alone.
In my youth, as a self-righteous teenager, I had privately accused
the scryers of handicapping every soulscaper that left the
mountain. After all, it was they who invoked the demons that
snagged at our ankles, in the form of our guardian-pursuers. I
could not understand why the ceremony was perpetuated; in my early
twenties, dreams of these legendary overseers had often left me
exhausted. As I matured, a weary philosophy had planed the edges of
my anger, leading me to think that soulscapers, because of the
potential strength of their skills, had to be curbed in some way,
and the threat of a judgemental spectre hanging over your head was
as good a way to curb a person as any other. A long time ago, I had
come to the conclusion that something very unfortunate must have
occurred in the past, which had inspired the Scaping Guild to
invent this particular torment. And it is a very private torment,
too. We soulscapers do not speak of it even to each other. When we
meet, we celebrate and joke, make love and talk together.
Sometimes, we might discuss scaping cases of mutual interest and
compare notes, but our haunt is never alluded to. As a child, I had
thought the guardian-pursuers to be very real, but as I grew older,
I concluded they were simply products of our own imaginations,
shaped into being by the trauma of the scrying rite we all undergo
at eight years of age. It’s not impossible that the scryers conjure
them forth from the murk of the soulscape itself, anchoring the
vigilant images to our conscious minds by an insidiously instilled
sense of guilt. This theory seemed to be reinforced by the fact
that, since the age of sixteen, I had given my guardian-pursuers
faces that belonged to people who were very much alive, or at least
had been at one time. No matter how often I had tried to change the
image in my head, whenever I thought of my guardian- pursuers, I
masked them with the faces of the Metatronims I had seen in
Sacramante.

It had begun
as soon as Ushas and I had returned home from the city. Even as I
plodded down the road of life towards the end of my thirty-fifth
year, I could still remember vividly, as if it had occurred only
weeks before, how deeply I’d been affected by the Metatronim
artisans; the experience had left claw marks on my soul. As I grew
older, I recognised that the erotic dream I’d had in the Carmen
Tricante, which at the time I had invested with all kinds of
significance, must have been nothing more but the flexing of a
developing sexuality. On my return to Taparak, I’d found myself a
lover quickly, to exorcise any residual anxiety my fantasies of
Beth Metatronim had caused. I had felt that I needed an emotional
protector. In my heart, I’d worried that the presence of the
Metatronim would follow me back to Taparak and haunt my dreams
forever. It did not happen that way, exactly.

Despite the
intensity of our brief friendship in Sacramante, Liviana Tricante
never came to visit me. Not long after I’d left the city, we did
exchange one letter each, six months apart, but neither of us
pursued the relationship beyond that point. I think I realised
that, despite Livvy’s enthusiasm to visit my home, Taparak would
bore her. Sometimes, I wondered what had happened to her, and
whether her brother, Salyon, had recovered fully from his
mindsickness. Occasionally, out on the road, I’d think about
heading towards Sacramante and finding out for myself but, for some
reason, I kept away from Bochanegra. Inside, I harboured a deep
aversion to returning there. It was strange, because, as a girl,
I’d enjoyed myself there so much, but perhaps memories of poor
Salyon’s hideous illness, and my bizarre reaction to meeting the
Metatronims, put me off.

Even now, the
Metatronims haunted my soul, in the form of my guardian-pursuers.
It is difficult to articulate what function these images actually
have. I suppose that, in its simplest terms, they are a symbol of
the striving for excellence in our work, and a reminder that,
because of the delicate nature of soulscaping, we should never
become complacent or careless. If we foul a job, the
guardian-pursuers will notice and fill our souls with dark despair.
If we succeed, they nurture us with feelings of love and
protection. I still believed it all to be a self-inflicted
judgement. As for my personal guardian-pursuers, they never
manifested more tangibly than as a pressure in my head, a
constriction around my heart; it felt as if they watched me from
afar. They were invisible beings, but I still found their scrutiny
oppressive. Occasionally, I’d become especially impatient with this
sense of close attention, whether it was the product of my own
imagination or not, and needed respite from it. I had discovered
that the concentration required for crossing new territory seemed
to quell the phantoms, dim their shapes, and silence their
whispers, which was probably the real reason why I had not headed
back to Taparak when the weather turned. With relief, I’d waved
goodbye to my guardian-pursuers on the coast of Lansaal and headed
north, visualising them as diminishing specks on the shore,
impotently ranting at my defection. See, it is a joke. I am not
afraid of them.

I had come
onto the mainland in southern Atruriey, the beginning of a long
meandering, which I envisaged would take me up through the mountain
state of Truskania and from there into what is known as the
unmapped lands - although they have been thoroughly mapped now for
over sixty years. I had become restless at home in Taparak, even
though I had only recently returned from a long ranging in Lansaal.
Without analysing my feelings or arguing with myself, I had packed
my bivouac, crossed the sea to Cozca, hurried down to Toinis, and
taken a ship north.

The Atruscans
are an astonishingly healthy race, devoid of most ailments -
soulscape ones included - so it was more like a holiday for me to
travel that way, rather than business. I was hired to tell stories
of my experiences more often than for my soulscaping skills,
because Atruscans love stories of any kind, and pester all
travellers to tell a few. The Atruscans are as hospitable as they
are hale; it is a shame we soulscapers so rarely have an excuse to
tread their lands.

After
shambling slowly north through Truskania, I led the autumn up into
the death of Khaltish summer. The Khaltic lands are peopled mostly
by nomads, although there are also a number of settlements, ranging
in size from small hamlets to walled towns. The nomad tribes are
notoriously superstitious people, prey to fears, haunts and other
mindsicknesses, and therefore rich pickings for the enterprising
soulscaper. It is not a circumstance without dangers, however, as
very often nomad superstition extends to a general mistrust and
fear of soulscapers themselves - lynchings are not unrecorded - but
if a person has taken the trouble to learn the three most common
tongues of the north, they can generally get by without causing
gross offence. Another problem is that nomad shamans tend to regard
soulscapers as professional rivals; so careful treading is required
when meeting new groups. I always prostrate myself to the shaman’s
goat, or whatever form of humility is asked for, before attempting
to offer my services around. If the ground seems too hot, I just
make it a social visit, wave farewell and move on. It is best to be
prudent in these matters.

So, there I
was, trudging miserably through the mud of Khalt, hoping the land
had not mysteriously become deserted around me, hoping desperately
that the first people I came across - should there be any - would
be friendly to soulscapers and anxious to make me feel at home. I
was making for a settlement called Yf, where stonecutters harvested
the earth, sending their produce east, west and south, to build the
palaces of shahs, kaliphs and lesser nobles. Khaltish stone was
also widely used in the construction of temples, as it was
generally believed to be of the very best quality. There are so
many temples throughout the civilised lands; I sometimes wondered
where all the deities came from. Gods were instrumental in my work,
so I always paid close attention to their temples, and felt
confident I was familiar with most religions. All deities are
present in the soulscape; they are as mutable as ocean, flowing and
ebbing, coming into prominence, declining into obscurity, but
always present. From careful observation as I travelled, I had
noticed that new gods tended to arrive in the community in waves,
almost like some bizarre soulscape emigration; they always came
from the west. New cults sprang up like spring growth, claiming
followers in droves. At first, a fresh religion would be passed by
word of mouth; new names would be used in oaths, new prayers would
appear on the tongues of the afflicted. Later, shrines would sprout
up along the road, and later still, temples that clung to the hills
from Sacramante to Atruriey, and beyond. I had sometimes wondered
if there was a common fount to all this spirituality, whether some
priestly wit, perhaps closeted in a high room in Bochanegra, spent
their time inventing new gods and dispersing the invention through
a team of professional travellers. The eastern races who, having a
fondness for antiquity, never throw anything away, whether it be an
idea or an object, tend to tack new god-forms onto their existing
pantheons, so that most religious cults in the east boast a
bristling forest of idols in their temples, each more specialised
than the last. There are scryers in Taparak who have no occupation
other than to catalogue this rich, ever-expanding divine
population.

Sundown was
barely recognisable as such, although the rain had thinned to an
all-pervading mist, drenching my clothes to the skin. I had vowed
to keep walking until Yf came into view and my persistence was
rewarded. Through the grey, murky twilight, lights appeared beside
the road up ahead, and I could smell wood-smoke and cooking
food.

The town was
flanked on either side by dark stone cliffs, most of which had been
burrowed into and excavated. Yf patronised the mason god Mofi, and
I passed a roadside shrine where a statue sat with chisel upraised,
humourless face staring out into the rain. Mofi was a stocky god,
renowned for his skill rather than his beauty, which was unusual.
It is fair to say he was rather oafish in appearance.

The buildings
of Yf are sturdy, blocky constructions, all of stone, with slate
roofs. I could see none more than single-storied. Too exhausted to
be circumspect, I waded up to the nearest door and knocked loudly.
After a few moments, a fair-skinned woman answered, carrying a
heavy kitchen utensil, which I guessed would double as a weapon
should this unexpected visitor prove hostile in some way.