Havenstar (19 page)

Corrian
leered. ‘Hard to ask a pussy not to stiffen its tail when the toms
come sniffing around.’

‘Looked more
like the pussy sniffing out the toms to me,’ she replied, poking at
the fire to help it along. She was beginning to learn how to talk
to the old woman without blushing.

Corrian’s
bright little eyes peered at her in interest. ‘Ah, I like you,
lass. Straight out of a chanterie class, but you’ve got spunk. And
a good head on you. Tell me, which one of the toms are you
wriggling yer backside for?’

‘I missed out
on a chanterie education, and I don’t think I’m—er—wriggling at all
yet.’

‘Slow, love,
slow,’ the woman chided. ‘This is going to be a dull journey, you
gotta have an interest on the way.’ She put the last of the yams in
the stew and considered. ‘Forget Quirk. I know his type. Born to
lose. Hopeless case and probably couldn’t get it up anyways. As for
Baraine, well, he’s a meaty hunk, but that type doesn’t go for
plain faces. All for show, he is, and you’re not the showy type. If
he did pick you up it’d only be because there was nothing else, and
he’d drop you at the first sign of summat better, and for him,
better may well be a pretty lad rather than a lass. Portron? Nah.
Chantors are bad luck. Too much conscience in types like him, even
though he’s got an eye for a bit of tail. Back in the Cess, half
our customers were encoloured bastards. Unable to live the straight
and narrow Chantry says they must, yet unable to admit it in
public. Sneaking around us whores in the dead of night instead,
wanting a quick fumble. They make sorry lovers, I can tell you.’
She grunted her contempt and passed on to Scow instead. ‘The
tainted one? He’s out, with those looks of his, unless you’ve got a
hankering for the grotesque and I bet you haven’t. And I’ve heard
that if you’re ley-lit it ain’t possible anyways, too painful.
They’re not called Untouchable for nothing. Graval? Now there’s a
possibility, if you don’t mind creeps down your spine. Ah, maybe I
exaggerate and he’s just a fool. Who knows? I’ve been wrong often
enough. Meldor has class; you could do well for y’self there, love,
and he can’t see neither.’

‘Thanks,’ she
said dryly, and then, when Corrian did not continue, she added,
‘You’ve missed out Master Storre.’

‘Ah, so it’s
him that interests, is it?’

She gaped at
Corrian. ‘Storre? Me and Davron Storre?’

‘Well, maybe
not. Anyways, that man you don’t mess with, lass. He carries his
storm with him wherever he goes, any woman worth her juices can see
that. He’s trouble and heartbreak and more besides. He hates
himself, that one, and that type’s always bad for a woman to be
around. You get beat up, or dragged down, one or t’other, with a
man like him. I like a man who can laugh, myself.’ She sighed
sadly. ‘Not that Davron wouldn’t be a good poke, mind—’

Keris busied
herself lifting the pot lid to stir the stew. ‘It’s no wonder you
feel in need of the longest pilgrimage.’

Corrian leered
some more, still puffing, and not in the least fazed. Keris had not
expected her to be.

~~~~~~~

Over dinner
Davron asked everyone to gather around and then told them what to
expect the next day. None of it was good. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we
meet our first ley line. It’s a small one, or it was back when it
was mapped a month or two ago. But it’s new—it never used to exist
here, and new lines are more unpredictable than old ones. Worse,
it’s an offshoot directly from the Snarled Fist, and such lines can
be powerful.’

‘What’s it
called?’ The question came from Quirk. They all knew he was not in
the least interested in the line’s name; he just needed to say
something to cover his fear. The first ley line, small or not, was
always the most dangerous for someone who was not ley-lit.

‘The mapmaker
has given it the name of the Dancer.’

‘Can’t we ride
around it?’

Scow answered
hastily before Davron, in exasperation, had time to give a sharp
reply. He shook his maned head and said, ‘If we could, we
would.’

‘Once we reach
the ley line, I will escort you across, one at a time,’ Davron
continued. ‘There is just one thing to remember: obey all orders,
no matter how silly they seem. If I tell you to stand on your head
and gesture a Chantry-praise, do it immediately and without
question.’ He emptied the dregs from his mug on to the ground.
‘That’s all.’

‘As an
after-dinner speech, that one seemed designed to wreck the
digestion,’ Quirk muttered to Keris.

Overhearing,
Portron chided him, saying, ‘Perform your kineses, lad, perform the
rituals, and you’ll be fine.’

‘Yeah,’ said
Quirk, ‘trouble is, out here, how’s the Maker going to see
them?’—but he waited until the chantor was out of earshot before he
said it.

~~~~~~~

Later that
night, as Keris was passing through the camp on her way back from
relieving herself away from the tents, a handful of words drifted
out from Scow’s tent into the silence of the night: ‘But Margraf,
would she know, do you think?’

She stopped
dead and turned her head towards the tent. Shadows cast on the
canvas wall told her Scow, Meldor and Davron were all inside. One
of them had spoken, but the words had been said so softly it was
impossible to say whose voice had given them life.

The
conversation murmured on, indistinct and desultory.

She turned
away, irrationally sure the speaker had been referring to her, but
it was not that which she found disturbing. It was the word
Margraf.

Once, there
had been a single monarch of all Malinawar. A Margrave or a
Margravine, he or she had been addressed by the honorific ‘Sire’.
The monarch had vanished with the Rending and the coming of the
Unstable, and now each stability had a Margrave, and each of the
eight was addressed as Margraf. They commanded the Defenders and
controlled the domain lords of their respective stabilities, but
everyone knew that true power resided with Chantry’s Sanhedrin.
What could a Margrave do, when every aspect of life was subject to
the Rule, which he himself—as Commander of the Defenders—was bound
to enforce? Two Hedrin from each stability combined to form the
sixteen-person Sanhedrin, and it was they, interpreting the Holy
Books, who said what was the Rule and what was not; it was they who
in truth ruled what had once been Malinawar. The Margraves were the
law enforcers, not the law-makers.

None of it
interested Keris much. All that concerned her now was that there
were eight Margraves, and certainly none of them was sitting inside
Scow’s tent. Who, then, had been addressed as Margraf? And why?

Later, just as
she was dropping off to sleep, she had a disquieting thought. What
if the Minions of Chaos had some sort of pecking order in their
ranks? What if the most important of them was addressed as
Margraf?

Davron? Or
Meldor?

Could Davron
be a Minion? Her cat had been terrified of him... But Davron’s
mount didn’t seem skittish when he rode it. Besides, he’d been well
inside the stability when he had come to Kibbleberry. No Minion
could do that. It was possible that a Minion could enter a border
town for a few hours at a time. Piers had told her that he had
heard of one or two such cases, but Kibbleberry wasn’t on the
border.

Her thoughts
went on, troubled and confused. What about Meldor? A Minion would
never be blind...would he?

~~~~~~~

Keris and
Portron were on guard duty together again that night. This time it
was Meldor who came to wake her. Much to her surprise she realised
that he had mounted guard alone. Sensing her astonishment he gave
one of his enigmatic smiles and said, ‘In the dark, I do better
than you do, you know. Be especially vigilant tonight, Keris; we
are close to the ley line and the Wild are difficult when
influenced by ley.’

Difficult
. She could have thought of a better word.

She took her
bow and arrows and her throwing knife and set off on a round of the
camp, passing Portron walking in the opposite direction on the way.
He did not look happy.

Twice she saw
shapes move out in the darkness and smelled the stench of the Wild;
once both she and Portron caught a glimpse of lights like half a
dozen huge fireflies twinkling amongst nearby rocks. Fireflies.
Hadn’t Piers mentioned magical fireflies once? Portron dismissed
the notion altogether. ‘That’s ley of some kind,’ he said, and his
voice was edged with hate. ‘Minions using ley to light their way.
They dance it out of their fingertips.’

‘Should we
tell Davron Storre they are here?’

He shook his
head. ‘They’re no danger when they light their way. It’s when
they’re as stealthy as rats in the kitchen you should fear. Keep an
eye on the lights, by all means, but be watching the darkness more,
for it’s there an attack comes from.’

As he
proceeded on his way, he tried to make his progress around the camp
unpredictable, varying his speed, sometimes doubling back,
sometimes stopping. She copied his style, realising how much more
effective it was than a sentry’s steady tramp, and as she walked
she tried to comfort herself with the thought that her father had
rarely mounted guard at all. Travelling alone as he often did, it
would not have been possible. But then, it was also easier to hide
the camp of one man than that of a fellowship.

This camp
is certainly not hidden from Minion eyes
...

She felt the
quiet menace drift in towards her, and shuddered. Circling the camp
in the dark, jumping at every movement, seeing things where there
was nothing to see, dreading what she did see, imagining every
sound was an approaching creature of the Wild or a Minion, she
spent the several hours of guard duty as tense as a lute
string.

Half an hour
before the first dawn light, Graval emerged from his tent. He
complained of stomach problems and made a dive for the camp
perimeter. She barely had time to warn him not to go too far.
‘Don’t worry,’ he whispered back out of the darkness. ‘I’m not
going any distance. First sign of trouble I’ll scream so loud I’ll
wake the camp.’

She worried
though, especially as the sky was beginning to lighten before he
returned. ‘What did you put in that damn stew?’ he grumbled as he
passed her on the way back.

Rarely had she
been so glad to see the dawn.

Davron was the
first person up. He nodded in her direction and went to Scow’s
tent, to check on his assistant’s foot, she supposed. Portron made
signs to her from the other side of the camp, indicating he wanted
to put an end to his guard duties in order to perform his morning
kineses, those of the Obeisance devotions. She nodded her
acknowledgement, and continued on her rounds.

There wasn’t
much to see yet. A ground mist hugged the land, blocking off any
sight there might have been of the ley line. But she knew it was
out there, somewhere. It came to her as a far off pulsing, neither
sound nor vibration, but rather a thickness felt as an emotion. It
did not remind her of the place where Scow had nearly lost his
foot. She could not sense wrongness, but rather...excitement. She
thrilled at its touch, and that shocked her.

She turned
away and circled the camp once more. By the time she’d returned to
the same spot facing the ley line, the mist had retreated a little
to uncover a group of ochre rocks some fifty paces away. Like much
of the landscape of the Unstable, they were an unnatural shade, too
bright to be normal. They crouched along the slope like animals
about to spring on prey, bright brassy animals with block-like
heads and solid haunches. She turned away, aware she was being
fanciful, imagining things...

And couldn’t
resist turning back, to take another look.

One of them
had moved. It was flesh and blood, not stone. It had crept up the
slope in the few seconds that her back had been turned. It had no
eyes, no face, just a blank yellow mass for a head, yet she felt
appallingly threatened. She unslung her bow from her back, fitted
an arrow with fingers that trembled, grateful that her bow was
strung and that she now wore the leather bracer on her arm as a
matter of course.

‘Master
Storre,’ she said, her voice penetrating and harsh, vibrant with an
appeal for help.

The animal
leapt towards her. There was unexpected power in those block-like
hindquarters. As the creature opened up in the first bound, she saw
what there was to fear. The mass of its head was nothing more than
rows of jagged teeth that meshed and unmeshed with crushing power
in two lines across its face. No mouth: its whole face was
toothed.

She released
the arrow. It thunked down into the earth, penetrating the soil
just in front of where she expected the animal to land, some thirty
paces away. A second and a third arrow followed in quick
succession. The beast skidded to a halt, its huge paws furrowing in
the dirt, its face ending up only inches away from the embedded
arrows.

It crouched
looking at her—if indeed it could look. There were no visible eyes,
no nostrils, no ears: just those teeth interlocking like the jaws
of a giant nutcracker. She expanded her awareness. Davron now stood
at her side with a throwing knife held by the blade, raised to
throw. Scow lumbered up on her other side, bandaged foot and all,
battle axe in hand, ready to let fly. The three of them stood,
poised, waiting.

And the
creature backed down. Its companions slunk away still looking like
blocks of stone, hunkering off on plate-sized paws with their
stomachs scraping the ground; the leader stood facing the camp for
a moment longer, then joined them.

There was a
collective sigh of relief. When Keris turned it was to see everyone
else standing behind them in various states of undress. Her call
had been more penetrating than she’d hoped.