Prisoner of Fate (2 page)
Authors: Tony Shillitoe
Se’Treya had no day or night. The light was constant, unchanging, like the ubiquitous dust. Sometimes, mirage-like, he imagined a distant discolouration on the horizon suggesting a mountain range or hills. Se’Treya reminded him of the Dragon Breath Plains of the old Andrakis, as if this magical Dragonlord construction was a replica of the real world—at least of the world that existed a thousand years ago.
I have lived a millennium
, A Ahmud Ki mused as he sank against the smooth white trunk of a leafless tree. He scooped a handful of grey dust and let it sift through his long, elegant fingers.
Everyone I ever knew is dust.
He chuckled and threw the dust at the silence. ‘I am immortal!’ he yelled. There was no comforting echo from the dead landscape.
Time was meaningless in this awful place. He had no idea how long he wandered across the endless grey. He had no idea of the direction he had taken.
I could be walking in circles
, he admitted, but there was no way of telling where he’d been because the moment he lifted his foot the fine dust filled the hollow of his footprint, settling as if a foot had never marred its surface. The only measures of time passing at all were his insatiable thirst and compelling hunger. He hadn’t found other entrances. His theory was wrong.
Frustrated, he stumbled through the dust from tree to tree, scratching a mark on each with his belt buckle. He wouldn’t senselessly retrace his passage. Se’Treya was designed to foil anyone except the immortal Dragonlords—but he had lived a thousand years and the Dragonlords were dead.
Who is smarter
? he posed. ‘You didn’t want me to be a Dragonlord, did you?’ he shouted at the emptiness. ‘But I am one! Do you hear me, Mareg? I
am
one!’
Stumbling blindly through the haze of exhaustion and thirst, the darkness swallowed him before he comprehended its existence beneath his feet. He fell, crashing down stone steps, and landed crumpled in an ungainly heap at the bottom. He lay on the hard floor for what seemed a long time before he rolled onto his side and blinked. The daylight filtering from the surface affected his Aelendyell night vision, so he wobbled onto all fours and crawled away from the light.
At first he thought he’d blundered back into his prison, but the chamber he discovered at the end of the corridor, though circular, was empty. Only one other corridor led out. He forced himself upright, using the rough wall as a prop, and tried unsuccessfully to lick
his parched lips, his swollen tongue sticking to the dry skin. He edged around the wall towards the corridor, surprised at how weak he felt, as if he hadn’t eaten or slept for a long time.
Why the malaise
? he wondered.
I haven’t been in Se’Treya for days. It can only be hours, surely.
But a voice within argued otherwise—that he’d wandered the grey plain until fatigue, thirst and hunger had finally caught up with him. He listened to the oppressive silence before he entered the corridor. He had found a new chamber.
I was right
, he decided as he crept forward, following the corridor around a steady curve to the left.
Twenty paces along, he froze. At the periphery of his night vision was light—a dull blue haze further around the curving corridor. His heart raced. He stumbled back a step, rising terror threatening to cripple his exhausted body. If the Horsemen came now, he had no strength left to fight or escape. He crept back further, his knees trembling, his ankles feeling like marshy peat, his temples thudding with fear, glancing behind in case he was trapped. When he reached the first chamber and the light was no longer visible, he held his breath and listened. Then he crept across the chamber to the steps, climbed and emerged in the false daylight.
I have nowhere to go
, he lamented silently.
I chose to come back to the place where I was meant to die a thousand years ago. What a cruel irony.
He slumped into the grey dust, sitting cross-legged as he’d trained his apprentices to sit to show patience.
I was once omnipotent
, he reminded himself.
Now I am a student again.
He laughed quietly.
I am going mad.
He stared at the descending steps, his eyes sticky and dry.
How long have I been here
? he wondered. Sitting before the entrance, he must have slept at some point, but he had no recollection of when he went to sleep or
for how long he had been asleep. His exhaustion was less, but his thirst and hunger were stronger. The Horsemen hadn’t pursued him this time, oblivious to his presence in the new chamber, but he knew he could not survive in the dust for much longer. If he couldn’t find an amber relic, he would die. That was inevitable. Whether it was wise or suicidal, he had to go down into the new chamber and follow the corridor.
There will be an end to it
, he decided, recognising the double meaning, and smiled grimly. Perhaps he could sneak by the Horsemen. Perhaps they had already moved on.
How many Demon Horsemen are there
? he wondered. It no longer mattered.
I can either die out here doing nothing or I might die down there trying to find the amber.
He coughed, the dry rasp hurting his parched throat, stood and approached the entrance, resolved to whatever fate awaited him.
The blue haze gradually brightened as he crept towards it. There was likely to be a Horseman on guard, given the static quality of the emanating light, and the thought gave him hope that the item being protected might belong to him. How he would get it from the Horsemen he could not comprehend. He simply had to know what was at the end of the corridor.
The light’s intensity increased until he was bathed in its blue brilliance. He saw, not a Demon Horseman as he feared, but a shimmering portal, a magical doorway. He looked for signs of other doors, alcoves, any place wherein someone could shelter or hide, but the corridor was solid and the portal stretched across its width and height. A Ahmud Ki carefully approached the light, gazing into its depth in the hope of seeing to where it might lead, looking for images of the place beyond, but the light was too fierce. He stared at it, recalling how he used to have the power to generate magical doorways
to wherever he chose, remembering how Meg used portals to escape her enemies.
Where else do I go
? he wondered. ‘I don’t know where you lead,’ he whispered hoarsely through his dry lips, ‘but if I stay here I will die.’ He snorted softly and a faint grin formed at the corners of his mouth. ‘I’ve been your prisoner far too long, Mareg. Time to say goodbye.’ He shrugged and stepped into the light.
ART
O
NE
‘Hope is deceptive. While it protects the heart from the pain of loss and grief, it numbs the soul to reality. Those who live in hope live in illusion.’
A
RIK
N
E
‘F
AROOK
, R
ANU
P
HILOSOPHER
T
hey came out of the clouds like ghosts, drifting faster than the wind, a host of white dragon eggs flying towards the city. As Meg watched from a distance, as she often did in dreams that foretold events that she would not witness, the dragon eggs passed over the rooftops and fireball after fireball erupted, until the entire city was ablaze and the sky and the dragon eggs were consumed in a pall of black smoke. Then the scene changed and she was running towards her tiny cottage in Marella, screaming for her daughter to leave. The sky darkened, the mass of bright flowers wilted instantly and shadows enveloped the cottage. Meg was running, but she could get no closer. She was screaming, but her voice was silent.
The images of her daughter struggling against the marauding shadows troubled her as she dressed in a dark-blue skirt and blouse, and descended to the stay-house’s common room. She had to go home.
Six guests sat at the long table—four men, two women. The wood-panelled walls were decorated with three large period paintings, each of people strolling through a stylised city park with the city buildings
screened by dense green trees. The painting opposite the entry depicted a multicoloured dragon egg hanging in a cloudy sky above the city. Broad-leaved plants were ranged along the walls in ceramic pots and the fourth wall had a wide bay window, curtained with white lacy muslin that let in light while muting the world beyond.
Two men nodded as she entered and stood politely until she took her seat. One, tall and slim with a scant blond beard, smiled awkwardly, showing his youthfulness. The other was older, rounder and shorter, and his clean-shaven ruddy cheeks revealed a propensity to drinking. ‘Good sleep?’ he inquired as the waitress placed a white bowl of berries, yoghurt and nuts before Meg.
‘Thank you, yes,’ she replied, but she avoided his gaze, not wanting to be drawn into conversation.
‘I heard the war is heating up,’ the young man offered.
‘You can’t believe what the newspapers say,’ chided the older man. ‘Sensationalism makes good headlines.’
‘What do you think?’ the young man asked.
The silence following his question warned Meg that it was directed to her so she raised her head and met his dark-blue eyes. His thin and boyish face was bland in features, and she felt sorry for him because he wouldn’t appeal to many girls. ‘I don’t know much about it,’ she said quietly, and looked down again to scoop another spoonful of her breakfast.
‘My name is Andrew Lyon,’ the young man continued. ‘Where are you from?’
Meg looked up. Even after fifteen years of living in Western Andrak she found Andrak names incomprehensible. In her homeland, names meant something—associated with the person’s trade or heritage, but in Andrak, names were meaningless—just names. ‘West,’ she said. ‘Marella.’
Andrew’s right eyebrow rose. ‘Then you’d have to know about the war. The front-line is close to there, isn’t it, Raph?’ he argued, turning to the older man for support.
Meg shrugged. ‘Soldiers come and go. I just don’t pay attention to it. The war has been going for as long as I’ve lived there.’
‘The war’s been going on for years, since before even I was born,’ the older man, Raph, said between mouthfuls of his warm drink. ‘The Ranu never seem strong enough to break through our lines and we never seem strong enough to drive them back.’
‘The governments deliberately keep it that way,’ declared the stout, brunette woman beside Andrew.
‘Why would they do that?’ Andrew asked.
‘Politics,’ Raph muttered. ‘War keeps people from complaining about the government. Good for the economy too. And invention.’
Meg listened to the dialogue while she ate, but she remained uninvolved despite Andrew’s efforts to coax her into the chatter and speculation, and as soon as she finished her light refreshment she retreated to her room. Gratefully alone, she sank into the blue fabric armchair beside the window and stared outside, deep in her thoughts.
Whitewashed stone buildings with red-tiled roofs faced into the street across from her stay-house, the comfortable residences of middle-class Andrak citizens. She used the Sunrise stay-house when she visited the Andrak capital, Lightsword, because it was centrally located, but this would be the last time. Her search for her lost son, Treasure, was fruitless. She had exhausted every clue, every possibility of finding him, and though she realised a long time ago that she would never find him, she returned to the capital every summer to search in the hope that a miracle would restore Treasure to her.
Remnants of the dream still plagued her. Years before, when she relinquished the power of the amber and its inevitably terrible consequences, she had expected that her prophetic dreams would stop and she would be normal, but they did not stop. She still dreamed of standing on a parapet with people facing an approaching storm, dreamed of travelling east into the sunrise, dreamed of many things that had not yet come to pass. She knew that some of her dreams were dreams of no consequence, but because so many others had taken shape in her life, though rarely as she expected, seeing her daughter, Emma, in a dream worried her. The shadows consuming her daughter were terrifying. She had to go home.
She retrieved her crimson travel bag from the top of the cream wardrobe. From the bathroom, she collected her brush and the jar of hair dye, stopping to check that her bobbed hair was still black to the roots. Although fifteen years had passed since she’d escaped from the Central Andrak Peacekeeper authorities by flying over the Great Dylan Ranges in Luca’s dragon egg, and the search for the foreign red-haired murderess had gone cold many years ago, she retained her stolen identity as Rees Feond. She’d spent too many years of her life running and hiding, and all she wanted was for Emma to grow up without living in fear. She even patiently waited for three years after her arrival in the town of Marella, to avoid risking discovery by the authorities, before she began the frustratingly painstaking search for her son, Treasure.
With a sigh, she grabbed her spare clothes, stuffed them into her bag, checked that she had all of her belongings and left the room. Downstairs she skirted the common room and the other guests, who were still talking over warm herbal teas, and entered the foyer, where a serious young man with near-seeing
lenses sat at a desk waiting for people to give him purpose. Meg asked him for her bill, paid it and exited the stay-house.
The few trees along the street were dropping their autumn foliage, bronze and brown and yellow leaves forming a thin stream in the gutters, the bare limbs embracing the sky. The clouds were perpetually low, a phenomenon that she’d never fully accepted since arriving in Andrak because the skies of her Western Shess homeland were nearly always blue and endless, broken only by storm clouds in the short, cold Shahk cycle. The season the Andraks called winter lasted too long for Meg and the adjoining spring and autumn seasons were not much warmer. She missed the long, hot sun-filled Fuar days when the grass burned yellow and the skies were eternal blue.
A tooting horn drew her eyes to a horseless carriage that popped and sputtered around a corner into the street, steam hissing from its backside as it carried its four intrepid riders on its spindly frame and three wheels. All brass and steel, with an outlandishly oversized pair of purple sofa-like seats perched above a tiny, dark metal single-piston steam engine, the horseless carriage trundled past, its passengers and driver waving as if they were the sideshow that everyone had stepped out of their houses to see hiss and rattle by.
The steam-powered carriages had started appearing on the streets two years ago, startling Meg the first time that she saw one. Their unreliability and propensity for accidents were already legendary, but people were fascinated by them and more were evident in Lightsword on this visit. Andrak inventors were constantly experimenting with sources of energy, seeking the magic of steam and improving the production of the fascinating wire-lightning that was rapidly replacing volatile gas pipes and lights.
As the noisy vehicle vanished down the street, Meg waved to a conveyor who was waiting outside the stay-house for customers. ‘I want to catch a coach to the west,’ she told the driver as she climbed into the two-seater carriage. The driver nodded, touched the rear of his roan horse lightly with his whip and the wind caressed Meg’s face as the conveyer clip-clopped along the cobbles.
There were only three passengers waiting for the coach at the station. Drawn by six horses, the coaches could carry up to twelve passengers—six inside and six on the outer sections. Meg had heard that the Andrak inventors were working on a steam-driven coach that could carry a hundred passengers, but none of the people who told Meg the rumours had actually seen the steam-coaches, and the coach drivers with whom she travelled across the Central Andrak plains and through the pass into Western Andrak did not believe such a vehicle could be built. ‘The inventors are clever,’ coach-driver Liam Haddrick told her when they stopped at an inn on the way to Lightsword, ‘but even they don’t have the magic to build a steam-coach to carry that many people. And who would want to be packed into a land vehicle with a hundred people anyway? Bad enough on a ship.’
She hoped Liam was driving this trip, but the man who took her ticket, loaded her bag onto the back and opened the door to let her board, was new to her. The passengers were two women and an elderly man. She smiled politely as she took her seat beside the man, and immediately looked out of the window to avoid attention, but her ploy failed. ‘So where are you bound, love?’ one of the women asked.
Meg turned her head, noting the woman’s plain grey dress, buttoned down the front, and her brown hair tied
back with a white ribbon. ‘Marella,’ she said. ‘West Andrak.’
The woman’s face hardened. ‘Haven’t you heard?’ she asked.
‘Heard what?’ Meg inquired.
‘The Ranu broke through the lines. They’ve taken Bordertown and Retreat and some of their troops are outside Claarn.’
Meg felt ice in her veins. ‘When did you hear this?’
‘This morning’s paper,’ the woman explained. ‘The government’s rushing troops from all areas to stop the Ranu advance. They say it’s the first time in thirty years that there’s been a real crisis.’
‘Where are you going, then?’ Meg asked, her mind racing with her heart, wondering how close to Marella the war had come.
‘Just to Tenhills,’ the woman replied. ‘My husband has a mill there.’ She reached forward and touched Meg’s knee gently, saying, ‘I didn’t mean to give you bad news. I thought people knew.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Meg, forcing a smile as she turned away. She stared back out of the window at the small crowd in the station. Fathers and mothers, children, old and young, carrying their belongings in black bags, blue bags, grey bags, patched bags and cases, shuffled in lines waiting to board coaches to different destinations across the Andrak nation.
‘So what will you do?’ the woman asked.
Meg smiled grimly. ‘I’ll go home.’
The midday sun was drowning in white clouds as the coach rattled along the westward road. The old man was asleep, mouth open, his head wobbling in motion with the bumps and hollows of the road. Meg leaned against the wooden window frame, oblivious to the women’s conversation opposite her as she stared at the
passing countryside, lost in her thoughts. If she had more money she could have hired a dragon egg flight to take her at least as far as the Great Dylan Ranges. That would have saved a day’s travel, possibly more, but she did not have the money. Working in Missus Tunbridge’s shirt factory, she earned enough to pay her rent and keep Emma and herself comfortable, and she scrimped to save the fares to travel east twice each year on her pilgrimage to find Treasure. When Emma married Tom Westborn last year, it seemed as if their financial situation would improve, but Tom joined the army and the women were left to fend for themselves again. With Emma pregnant, their money was precious and limited.
The thought of her pregnant daughter alone with the Ranu army bearing down on the town of Marella revived the icy emotion in her stomach and she fought back tears as she stared at the rolling landscape. She never expected the war to become a threat. No one ever did. The war between the Ranu and Andrak was almost an institution—a constant event in people’s everyday lives. The front-line was a recognised feature of the landscape. What had fostered the change? Why was the war suddenly spreading east?
Emma will have escaped
, she reasoned.
The people will be heading east to safety and Emma will be among them. She has Whisper and Whisper knows how to survive adversity. The bush rat saved my life countless times. Emma will be safe.
Her reverie was shattered by the coach slewing to a halt and the driver yelling, ‘Get out! Look at this! Get out!’
The women scrambled out of the coach door while Meg woke the old man who coughed and spluttered and struggled to get his bearings.
‘What is it?’ Meg asked as she alighted.
‘Oh, in heaven’s name,’ gasped the woman who’d told her about the changing fortunes of the war. Meg
looked up. Drifting east, directly overhead, was an armada of dragon eggs, all stark white, almost invisible against the clouds except for the dark frames of the baskets beneath the white fabric.
‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’ the other woman asked.
‘Ranu dragon eggs,’ the old man mumbled, shielding his eyes with his right hand. ‘That’s what they are. Ranu.’
‘They’re heading for Lightsword,’ said the driver.
‘This far east?’ the first woman asked in disbelief.
‘I don’t understand it,’ the driver replied. ‘Something’s happened—something big.’
‘I counted thirty-five,’ the second woman announced.
‘I’ve only seen that many dragon eggs in one place at festivals,’ said the driver. He shrugged. ‘They’re moving very quickly. The wind down here isn’t strong enough to carry them like that.’
‘Should we go back?’ the first woman asked.
‘No,’ Meg said abruptly. The others stared at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I have to get home.’