Havenstar (66 page)

She scrambled
up on to her knees and looked about them. The ley had vanished from
the area she had mapped. They were in a small rectangle of
stability—not Havenstar stability but real stability. There was
normal meadow grass beneath her feet, tangled through with flowers
and thistles. To her left she could see the Beast, lying on the
ground under some trees. It was not moving.

Stretching off
in that direction, the landscape seemed stable, normal, until it
met the band of purple that bordered it like a wall. A few
scattered patches of ley did remain, where perhaps it had been at
its most virulent. In one of the patches the Unmaker stood,
marooned. He was reeling, and his figure was no longer quite human.
His face seemed flattened and deformed; his body kept shifting in
size and shape, as if he was having trouble maintaining a human
form. As if he could not quite decide what he was supposed to look
like.

She said, more
to herself than to Davron, ‘Of course! He must have been there in
the ley the Beast was dragging, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so
evil.’ And then the truth of what she was seeing really hit her.
‘Maker and midden,’ she whispered, clutching hard at Davron. ‘I
stabilised the Unmaker.’

She turned to
him, appalled at the enormity of what she’d done. And felt his
anger at Carasma. The rage in him was deep, rooted wrath, the
product of his five years of pain. Every muscle tensed.

‘No—’ she
said, fearing what he would do. He mustn’t die now, not when he was
free of his sigil.

And then
someone screamed at them, tearing her out of one fear and into
another. ‘Look out! Keris, Davron, look out—’

They both
turned in shock. It was the Chameleon.

Hidden,
watching all that had happened, driven half-mad by the shock of
being suddenly stabilized, Quirk had staggered to his feet because
he had seen what Keris and Davron had not: the Beast lived. It had
dragged itself up and was lumbering towards them, insane with fear
and rage and stability, intent on the destruction of the man it
blamed. It lowered its fiery prong and began to gather speed.

‘Oh Chaos,’
she whispered.

Davron stood,
his body straightening, to find poise and courage where moments
before he had seemed beyond both.

And Quirk
flung himself across the intervening space towards the Beast,
waving and shouting, attracting its attention. It hesitated and
turned towards him. And charged.

It was all the
time she and Davron needed. Ley fled from their hands, fast and
true and searing. The Beast shook its gigantic head in pain. Quirk
danced nimbly out of the way.

The ley
bounced across the burning hide of the Beast, annoying but not
destroying it.

‘Its eyes, go
for its eyes,’ Davron said.

The beast
turned back towards its tormentors. This time the ley pierced its
eyes and it bellowed with rage and pain, but still it came on, head
lowered like a bull about to toss an attacking dog.

‘Do you have
your knife?’ Davron asked, almost casually. His hand reached to his
waist where the whip handle was thrust through his belt. The
plaited rawhide with its impregnated glass lay curled against his
thigh. He shook it free and held out his left hand to Keris. She
pressed her knife into his palm.

As the Beast
ploughed towards Davron, the whip snaked out and wrapped itself
around the base of its red-hot prong. Davron dodged to run
alongside the blinded creature, brushing against it, shoulder to
shoulder as it swung around. Then, hauling himself up on the whip,
he plunged the knife deep into its eye. The great animal sagged,
its run ending. Its prong snapped, sawn through as Davron wrenched
on the whip handle. He fell free, tumbling. Ichor pumped out of the
wound left in the Beast’s forehead as its body toppled, missing
Davron by inches.

And it
changed. It had been animal-like; now it became something else. A
blackness, a nothingness that had dimension, a dark furriness. The
earth beneath it crumbled as if eaten away. Davron scrambled back
from the edge of the hollow in shock.

She winced,
realising that the smell of scorched meat in her nostrils was
Davron’s own flesh, crisped where he had brushed against the Beast.
He must have been in agony, yet he did not acknowledge that he’d
been hurt. He stared down at the blackness that had been the Beast
and watched it melt away until there was nothing left but a hole
with charred edges, and the still-smoking horn lying nearby on the
ground. Then he turned towards the Unmaker.

Carasma stood
where he had been, in the midst of the small patch of ley. His
human form had further disintegrated. It was blurred now, its shape
only vaguely human. A string of ley snaked out from him and before
any of them could react it had encircled Quirk’s neck. Quirk stood
rigid with terror within the razor-sharp light of it. It was as
slick as a honed knife blade, as dangerous as a garrotter’s wire,
and it was clear from the expression on his face that the Chameleon
had been made to see it even though it was made of ley. One false
move and he would decapitate himself.

‘Don’t touch
me,’ Carasma said to Davron, ‘or I’ll kill this excuse for a
man.’

Keris flicked
a glance at Davron in which terror and horrified astonishment were
equally mixed. Carasma was
frightened?

‘I belong to
the Maker,’ the Chameleon pointed out, his voice squeaky with
fright. ‘You cannot touch me, or you break the Law of the Universe,
and condemn yourself.’

‘Quirk will
cut his own head off if he moves as much as an inch,’ Davron
whispered to her, despairing, ‘and Carasma won’t have done a
thing.’ Sooner or later Quirk would tire and fall against the
garrotte…

‘Do nothing,’
the Unmaker warned Davron, ‘or I will never loose him.’ His mouth
was a mouth no longer, yet he spoke.

‘Coward,’
Quirk said, still squeaking. ‘Pick on someone your own size. What
are you anyway, some bully in the school-room? Is this the great
Lord Carasma? Why, you’re a nothing! Scared shitless, you are, with
only your feet damped by ley. Put you in a stability, and you’re
gutless!’

He’s
right
, she thought in wonder.
Carasma’s afraid, because he
can only survive on this world within ley. And all he has about him
is that little ley mud puddle
… She watched his wavering form
and wondered if he felt pain. He’d indicated once that he could
not, yet obviously being marooned in such a small patch of ley
caused him an anguish he could not hide.
Perhaps he fears
extinction. Or madness
.

And then she
saw what he was doing. He was sending out another string of ley,
this time towards the band of purple that edged the area of created
stability. He intended to hook on to it, to pull it to himself, to
make himself safe again in a haven of ley. All he needed was a
little time.

‘You worm,’
Quirk told Carasma. Keris signed a kinesis of silence, but the
Chameleon took no notice. He seemed unable to keep his mouth
sensibly shut. ‘How are you going to crawl out of this one, eh?
That’s stability all around you. And let me tell you something else
you don’t know, you oh, so clever fellow—burning a trompleri map
brings instant stability. That’s what happened here, in case you
didn’t notice. And yesterday Meldor the Blind burnt trompleri maps
up and down the borders of Havenstar, sizzling your Minions to a
blister, or sending them crazy.’

‘You’re mad!’
the Unmaker rasped, but his shock was obvious.

‘Yes, of
course I am. Flinging me from unstable Havenstar to stability like
this has sent me out of my mind!’ Quirk laughed, giggled. ‘I’m the
biggest coward in the world—ask anyone, yet here I am telling the
great Lord Carasma the unpalatable truths he doesn’t want to hear.
Hasn’t the guts to hear! I’m as mad as a water-beetle. But I’m just
an Unbound man. Imagine what has happened to your Corrupted Ones.
Your Minions and their pets are dropping dead all around the
borders to Havenstar, raving mad and foaming at the mouth.’

‘It’s true,’
Davron agreed. ‘My word on it as a Trician of Storre, honour of a
Master Guide. Your attack on Havenstar has failed. And don’t think
that killing Keris here will stop the output of trompleri maps. The
secret of their making is no secret any longer. Anyone can make a
trompleri map now, thanks to us.’

Through the
ley, Carasma tested the truth of Quirk’s words and darted a
desperate look around.

‘You’ve
failed, you miserable cur,’ Quirk said. ‘Your Minions are dying and
the Unstable will soon be ours—what then, Lord Muck of
nowhere?’

And Carasma,
in a burst of uncontrolled rage, jerked on the line of ley that
ringed the Chameleon’s neck.

‘No!’ Keris
shrieked.

The Unmaker
blanched, realising too late what he had done.

For a moment
Quirk still stood, face expressionless, as if nothing had happened.
Then his head rolled from his shoulders, the severing cut so fine
that at first there did not seem to be even any blood. For one
horrifying moment his body still stood where it was. Then, silently
it fountained blood and crumpled.

And the anger
in Davron sought its balm.

He pulled the
ley surrounding the Unmaker into himself: all its savage colour,
all its corruption and contamination. It unwound from the ley-mire
like string from a ball and twisted its way across the intervening
space towards the guide.

Carasma
battled its loss, but he was weakened by the nearness of stability,
driven to the edge of madness by its encirclement, fundamentally
damaged because of his crime against the Law. He had killed one of
the Maker’s own.

Yet he tried.
Both of them, man and Unmaker, tugged at the ley. It writhed and
twisted between the two like the gut of a slaughtered animal. Two
combatants swaying and battling for supremacy, one a being called
to account for his offence against the Law, the other a man fuelled
by his anger at what had been taken from him. The weapon was not
brute force, but will.

‘Maker!’
Davron cried, the cry of a man too long denied solace. And the ley
moved towards him.

The age-old
battle between Chaos and Creation had been replayed yet again, and
this time Chaos lost.

Lord Carasma
the Unmaker took the only way out. He reached upwards to the other
parts of himself, to the Chaos of the Universe beyond the world,
and pulled himself free.

The force of
his going rent the air and ground. The earth was split deep beneath
his feet, hurtling the Chameleon’s body into the rift. The air was
ripped apart from ground to sky by a band of black lightning, the
bitter acridity of it lingering long after it was gone. Carasma
vanished with it, gone in a flash of Chaos back to the beginnings
of the Universe to lick his wounds, leaving the world to the
Maker.

~~~~~~~

The sun shone
and the grass was crisply green. It crushed beneath Keris’s feet,
and stayed crushed even after she’d crossed to Davron’s side. She
gathered him into her arms, his skin to her skin, feeling his body
pressed against hers for the first time.

‘Davron?’

‘I’m here.
Weak, but I’m here.’

‘I think you
have to rid yourself of the ley you have in you. It’s too
contaminated.’

‘Maker, yes.
It’ll kill me else. Let me rest a minute and then we’ll go to the
Writhe. I’ll replace it there.’

‘Are you sure
you’re all right? Those burns—’

‘Try a spot of
healing, love. It would help. It bloody hurts.’

‘I don’t know
how.’

‘Give me your
ley. Think of it as a balm, turn it towards healing, and tease it
out to me.’

She did as he
asked, doing her best to soothe away his pain, but the depth of the
anguish she saw in his eyes—that she was not sure she could ever
cure. She bent over him and her tears came. Tears of grief, of
relief, of sorrow. For Davron, for Quirk. For what they both had
lost.

‘I’m sorry,’
Davron said, ‘about Quirk. It was—quick. Was he truly mad, do you
think, or did he goad Carasma deliberately? Knowing what he might
achieve?’

‘He—he knew I
was going to burn a map. He must have known he could burn with it,
and yet he stayed; he was that brave. Was he mad after that?
Perhaps. But I think he knew what he was doing nonetheless.’ She
choked on the words, remembering, and had to stop.

He held her
close, cradling her, burying his face into her neck ‘I don’t know
that I can go on living,’ he whispered at last. ‘Keris—the village,
Dawnbreak. What I did—’

‘You did
nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘The crime was Carasma’s. And you—you
and Quirk between you—you have sent the Unmaker back to the
beginnings of Time. How many will not die young because of that?
How many will never be tainted? What you’ve done this day will set
the balance right. As for any idea of not living: do you think I
will let you go so easily? Davron, we have a future. For the first
time I can hold you! And you can see your daughter, look after her,
love her. And perhaps we can even look for your son. Don’t speak to
me of not being able to live!’

She smiled
down at him, and entwined her hand with his. Then she held the
interlocked hands up for him to see. ‘Look,’ she whispered. ‘Look
at that, and tell me you want to die.’

She looked so
smugly pleased he couldn’t help himself; he laughed.

And Davron of
Storre began to heal.

~~~~~~~

And why should
we stop there? Once there were other lands: Yedron and Yefron,
Bellisthron and Brazis. Once there was a sea that stretched beyond
the horizon. Should we not seek to find these places again?