Havenstar (64 page)

He turned his
blind eyes towards Scow. ‘You job will be to stop him if it looks
like he is dooming Havenstar. But I rather think it might be better
if you didn’t kill him.’

‘And how by
all that’s dark in Chaos do I do that? Go up to him and say, “Do
stop it, Davron, there’s a good fellow”?’

‘Try. Our
lives—our land—may depend on your success.’

Keris shot an
unpleasant look at the Margrave, forgetting he wouldn’t see it.
‘I’ll be with you, Scow,’ she said.

‘And me too,’
Quirk added. ‘Sometimes a Chameleon can creep up on a body and do
things—like bop him over the head—when he least expects it.’

Scow regarded
him gravely. ‘For a coward, Quirk, you do behave in the most
extraordinarily brave way.’

‘Well, I
haven’t actually done it yet.’

‘Be ready to
move in an hour,’ the Margraf said.

Obedient, Scow
and Quirk immediately stood to go. Keris stood as well, but it was
to say, ‘I’d like to talk to you alone, if I may, Margraf.’ Meldor
nodded his acquiescence, and as soon as the others had left the
room, she said, ‘You deliberately let this happen, didn’t you?’

He did not
pretend to misunderstand. ‘You mean, did I order Davron to ride out
with you all the time, knowing Carasma would call him and I
wouldn’t be there to stop it? Yes, I did.’

‘
Why?
’
The word was torn from her, her agony real. ‘You made a promise to
him, and you betrayed him.’

‘Davron had
faith in me. Can’t you also take it on trust, Keris?’

‘No! No, I
can’t. You wanted him to go to the Unmaker—why?’

‘Years ago, I
promised I would have him killed when the Unmaker called, if I
could. But things have changed since then. You came along, with
your maps, the Chameleon appeared, and Chantor Portron. We found
out how to stabilise the Unstable. All these things changed the
face of the future. I could re-interpret the Book of Predictions. I
came to believe that our hope lay in Davron going to Carasma. After
all, one passage says he has hope in his hand, while another
suggests that he is both the betrayer and the salvation of us all.
It says something about him casting the Unmaker into Chaos.’ He
looked at Keris with compassion. ‘My dear, Davron accepted it. He
accepted that he is fated to kill innocent people. If he lives,
then he will have to come to terms with that, but I suspect he does
not think he will live long enough to have to worry about it. He
knows that he could doom us all, or save us all. For the first time
since the Unmaker came to our benighted land we have a
chance.
Davron is that chance. There is no easy road for
him, or for you, but the Maker does not choose the weak to be the
keys to the future. Hold to that—that Davron is strong enough in
resources to find a way to save us all.’

‘You let it
happen,’ she accused again.

‘Yes, and he
acquiesced. We are all in the Maker’s hands.’

‘Chaos—I wish
we were! But the Maker probably can’t even see us here. This is
Carasma’s realm! And maybe the Maker doesn’t care.’

‘He cares.
Never doubt that. Keris, over the centuries He sent us word, and He
gave
me
the wisdom to see which were His words. We have a
chance because of what He has done. Have faith. Never
despair—never. Everything may depend on that. Just as I believe
everything will depend on Davron never giving up. It is my belief,
my hope that he won’t, that it is not in his nature to give up, no
matter how terrible his fate. If he was a different sort of man, he
would have killed himself long since, and we would all be doomed as
a consequence.’

She blinked
away tears. ‘You ask too much of him. The Maker asks too much.
Innocent people will die at his hands? That will devastate him
beyond bearing!’

Meldor was
implacable. ‘Yes, it will. Go to him, Keris. Help him to be
strong.’

She stood,
without replying. There seemed to be no more words she could say.
Even words of farewell seemed superfluous. With his usual unerring
instinct, he reached out and touched her hand, no more than that.
She allowed the touch, knowing it said all that could be said, and
then left him.

~~~~~~~

And of those
who hold our hope and stand before Lord Carasma in the final hour
of battle: even in victory shall one fall; in defeat all shall
die.

Predictions
XXIV: 6: 1

With the dawn,
Keris, Scow and Quirk saw for the first time the rampant, turbulent
ley now loose within the bounds of Havenstar.
A flood,
Keris
thought, shocked. Storm ley turgid within the very heart Havenstar…
And she felt something clench right in the middle of her chest.
Fear, pure fear. It screwed up her insides like ruthless hands
wringing out a cloth.

It was only
ley, she knew, but such ley.

Purple—not
clear magenta-purple, but an angry colour, slashed through with
bulging skeins of puce and plum. Ugly, threatening. It rolled
inexorably across the landscape before them, from right to left,
head-high and moving.

I can’t be
tainted,
she thought.
I have no need to fear this
. But
fear she did.

‘Is it very
bad?’ Quirk asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And
he
did this?’

She nodded
miserably. ‘It must be killing him.’ It was an unfortunate choice
of words. Scow blanched, aware that the killing of Davron was
exactly what might result from a confrontation between them.

A rider, a
stranger, came plunging out of the ley. He was whipping his horse,
and did not slow even though he must have seen them. They drew up
and waited, but he galloped past, unheeding. Wild eyes stared
unseeing out of a blanched face and there was a trickle of blood
down his cheek.

‘What is there
up ahead?’ Keris asked Scow. Her voice was thin and unnaturally
high.

Scow answered,
equally shaken. ‘A village. Dawnbreak. About half an hour’s ride
from here. Fifteen houses or so, maybe sixty or seventy people.
It’s the only village between us and the Knuckle. A farming
community. There are a couple of additional isolated farms as well,
over to the east. That’s all. The other villages are behind us,
outside of the ley still, I would say.’ He sounded matter-of-fact,
but there was none of his usual good-humour lurking in his
voice.

‘This is
scaring my eyelashes off,’ the Chameleon said. ‘Do we ride on?’ He
meant, ‘Do we ride on into
that
?’

She nodded and
resolutely dug her heels into the sides of the tainted beast she
was riding. They stopped again just before they entered the ley,
not because they hesitated to enter, but because they saw shapes
coming towards them out of it. People, the inhabitants of
Dawnbreak, fleeing on foot or leading carts loaded with their
families and their most precious belongings. They emerged from the
thick tangle of ley, coughing and retching as if they’d been
walking in particle-laden smoke, the pitiful human remnants of what
had been a prosperous village of Haveners.

The first man
staggered past dazed and unheeding. It seemed doubtful that he even
realised he’d emerged from the ley. He was middle-aged, wearing the
rough working clothes of a farmer and leading a tainted ox and
wagon. The rest of his family were piled on to the wagon: an old
woman, a younger woman with furred ears, and three children, all
tainted. Every one of them was bloodied, dirty, exhausted. One of
the children was hideously maimed, twisted into something that
scarcely seemed human. The younger woman held the girl and rocked
to and fro, crooning in a monotone that set Keris’s teeth on edge.
The child looked out of idiot eyes and drooled.

Keris felt the
tears coming and bit them back.
Davron! Oh, Maker, Davron my
love…

Another woman
stepped out of the ley behind the first group. There was more sense
in her gaze, although she limped and reeled as she walked. ‘Don’t
go that way, milady,’ she said to Keris and shuddered. ‘Don’t go
that way.’ Scow dismounted and reached out to stop her, but she
eluded his grasp and waded on. ‘The ley is coming!’ she shouted at
him. ‘I don’t have time to stop.’

Scow let her
pass and clutched at one of the refugees in the next group instead.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Tell us!’

The man,
wearing the collar tags of the Havenguard, looked fearfully back
over his shoulder. He wore the ring of the ley-lit and had a child
on his back and another in his arms. ‘The Lord Betrayer,’ he said.
‘The Lord Betrayer came, riding on the Beast. And he pulled the ley
behind him. Such ley!—I’ve never seen such ley. Red ley, red as
blood. The colour of fresh-spilled blood.’ The eyes that gazed at
Scow’s were wild with pain and shock. ‘I had three untainted
children.’ He held out the child he carried so they could see her.
She was more animal than human, with the furred face of a weasel
and the sharp teeth of a carnivore. ‘See?’ he asked. He sounded
half-mad. ‘She’s wildish now. Look at her. She can’t even talk. Her
mother went mad and killed herself. Yesterday I had a wife and
three fine children and a farm and a house and a life.’ He started
crying. ‘Then the Beast came. The Beast and the Betrayer.’

No. Oh,
no
.

Davron, love,
how will you ever forgive yourself?

The child
standing silently at the man’s side clutched a kitten and sucked
her thumb. She was nine or ten years old and she had ley-lit eyes
that were too large: terror-filled.

No child ought
to look like that…

‘Poor
Havenstar,’ the man said. ‘My poor children.’ He turned away and
walked on with his burden.

‘The Beast?’
Quirk asked finally.

She shook her
head. She knew no more than he did.

They stood,
numbed, waiting for nothing in particular, while that pathetic
stream of people passed with their jumbled belongings, things
chosen unwisely in their hurry. This one had saved the wind-chimes
from the doorway, but had forgotten to bring food for the children;
that one had bundled his daughters onto a cart wearing only thin
shifts. Almost all the children were tainted or deformed. At least
one they saw was dead.

And as they
streamed by, those uprooted people, Scow’s normal ebullience dulled
and the Chameleon looked away, refusing to do more than glance at
them. Both Scow and Quirk were Haveners now, and the spirit of the
land had entered their blood. She knew they must have felt its
demise like molten metal eating through their skin to their hearts.
Even she, who was not bonded as they were, ached with a pain almost
beyond bearing. Dead children, tainted human beings, a village
lost, broken hopes and dreams; it all hurt so.

And then one
last desperate scatter of people passed by in silence, heads down,
and Quirk said in a flat, unemotional voice, ‘There were only forty
people, counting the children.’

‘He did this.
How ever will he live with himself afterwards?’ Scow murmured.

Nobody said
that he night not be alive afterwards. Nobody said that it might be
up to them to kill him if that was the only way it could be
stopped. Nobody mentioned his name.

‘Let’s move
on,’ Keris said.

‘Where to?’
Quirk asked.

‘Meldor said
the Knuckle, so I suppose that’s where we’ll look first.’

She urged her
reluctant mount forward and entered the purple skeins. Even Scow
and Quirk, who could see nothing more than mist, were subdued by
it. It clung, wet and cloying and evil.
Only power,
she
tried to convince herself, and failed. This was more than just ley.
It had been tainted by the Unmaker as well…it was evil.

They saw then
that not all the people had managed to escape. Some were still
running inside the ley, almost aimlessly, no longer sure of
direction or where safety lay. They were fleeing in panic, beyond
rationale—and the children they carried with them were screaming in
terror, their bodies newly twisted with brutal tainting.

‘Oh Maker
preserve us.’ Quirk’s whisper was hardly more than a strangled
protest in his throat.

They tried to
offer assistance, to point the way out of the ley, but these people
were beyond assistance, beyond reason.

‘We must stop
him.’ It was Scow who gave voice to what they were all thinking.
There was a new hardness in his voice, leaving no doubt he’d kill
his friend if he must.

If he
can.
Keris drew out her compass, hoping to keep a correct
heading towards the Knuckle, although compasses were notoriously
unreliable when ley was nearby. However, there was no other way
they could work out the direction anymore. All recognisable
landmarks around them were being dissolved. The trees they passed
were melting down into slime, the grass beneath the feet of their
mounts was slick with foulness, already decomposing. The smell of
putrefaction saturated the air around them.

When they
reached Dawnbreak, it was to find the houses were already
half-dissolved into rotting heaps. Farm animals lay piled together
in yards, flesh liquefying, smelling vile. There was nothing in the
fields that resembled growing crops, and it took imagination to
resurrect the lines of rotten stumps into fences or hedgerows. The
village and its surroundings were all disintegrating into
foulness.

The ley was
thick around it, and dark. It was almost as if it was
feeding
on the ruins.

‘Let’s go on,’
said Scow quietly.

Keris and
Quirk turned their mounts after Scow without a word.

~~~~~~~

‘I’m going
back,’ Keris said.

‘But why?’
Scow asked, reining in beside her.

‘He’s not
there,’ Keris said flatly. ‘He won’t be in the Knuckle.