Sorcery Rising (54 page)

When at last Illustria raised her head, he could see that the front of her sabatka was so wet that it was almost as if he could see the glitter of her eyes through the sodden veil, though she had made no sound at all.
Was the fabric so fragile; or were the tears a mother cried for the loss of her favourite son unusually potent?
It was an uncharacteristically uncharitable thought and he felt ashamed at once. Without thinking, he took three steps across the room and laid a hand gently on her shoulder; and at once was assailed by her grief. It was so powerful that for a few moments he forgot to break the contact, as wave after wave of despair rose and broke upon the shore of his consciousness; and when at last he removed his hand the room swayed and canted and his knees gave way.

‘Saro!’

His mother’s dark shape loomed over him, her mouth, painted in Falla’s colours, all red and gold –
to welcome her husband home, he wondered incongruously; or his brother, Fabel?

‘Don’t touch me,’ he said sharply, as her hand hovered towards him. ‘I’m all right, truly.’ He levered himself upright.

‘You look . . . terrible.’ Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.

‘It’s been a long journey, Mother. I’m very tired, that’s all.’ He pushed himself quickly to his feet, wincing as his body registered the impact of his fall. The moodstone, safe in its leather pouch, thumped coldly against his breastbone; and he raised his hand unthinkingly to still it. As he did so, an acrid smell filled the room. It was an aroma he had become all too familiar with by now.

‘I must wash him again,’ he said dully, turning to his mother. ‘Perhaps you could ask one of the girls to help me?’

‘Nonsense,’ Illustria was brisk, all trace of tears gone from her voice. ‘I looked after him for years when he could do nothing for himself, and I shall do it again now. He is only ill: I shall nurse him back to health myself.

Such assurance in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Saro thought; and how quickly she had gone from hysteria to this controlled calm. It was no wonder she had managed to mask her infidelity so effectively. ‘Father said I must care for him.’

‘And I say that my women and I will do it, and that no one else shall enter this chamber without my express permission.’

‘He will be angry.’

‘Let him be angry: I am not going to lose both of my sons. You look dead on your feet, Saro: go and rest. I will talk to your father.’

And so for the next fortnight, Saro had found himself with time on his hands, as Illustria held to her word and in this one matter forced her will upon his father. Saro had heard their raised voices permeating even the thickest walls of the villa, rising from Tanto’s chamber (they had laid him in one of the guest rooms on the ground floor, where water could be fetched and carried more easily); then from the corridor outside, and finally from the entrance to the women’s room, and had marvelled how so demure a woman as his mother could become so fearsomely strident when her protective instincts were thus engaged. There had come the sound of a heavy oak door slamming shut with such force that the walls reverberated; and then silence, and Saro reckoned his mother had won her argument, for thereafter during the daylight hours he found the way to his brother’s chamber barred by the presence of Fina, a large woman whose grim and silent demeanour had as much to do with her bad temper as the loss of her tongue to a cruel slavemaster at the Gibeon market whence they had purchased her.

He had occupied himself mainly in walking the hills, ostensibly to exercise the hounds, but more to escape the smell of his brother’s rotting body and the oppressive quiet of the villa. He would sit amid the sage brush and wild mallow watching the larks soaring into the deep-blue sky and eating the bread and cheese he had taken from the breakfast table, while the dogs rootled cheerfully among the rabbit holes and limestone terraces and brought him sticks and stones and even once a small brown snake with one head at either end of its twisting body which, miraculously unharmed by those sharp canine incisors, had observed him cautiously out of its four unnervingly unblinking copper eyes before slithering quickly under away into the shadows. And sometimes he caught himself thinking about a wild northern girl with hair which had blazed like a beacon on the top of Falla’s Rock; and then he would catch the thought and stow it carefully away before her dark fate came back to torment him.

Some time later a merchant train came through Altea town and Favio, in a sudden and uncharacteristic burst of hospitality, invited the visitors to the house. They too, it transpired, had been at the Allfair and had left early like the Vingos, making their slow path south on a roundabout route that meandered from town to town selling the wares they had come by there. As well as silver, they had gleaned a wealth of rumour on their passage.

‘There are a lot of angry people in Cera and Forent,’ said the leader of the caravan, one Gesto Ardum. He was a stout man in his middle fifties and liked to make it plain he had seen a lot of the world and knew well its workings. Every other sentence was peppered with famous names, as if he thought his perorations would somehow carry greater weight because of his passing acquaintance with these nobles and artists. Saro had taken a hearty dislike to the man. Even now he was citing another of them, punctuating his words by waving a half-chewed chicken leg in the air. ‘My friend, Lord Palto – who has a large castle, you know, on the outskirts of Cera – says Rui Finco was quite furious after the Fair; that he was storming around swearing the northerners had become far too confident, and that their new king is a dangerous man and needs taking down a peg or two. And of course the Dystras are quite distraught that he spurned the Swan in favour of a Footloose whore, though the poet Fano Cirio, who often passes his summers at the court at Jetra, told me in confidence that the lady herself is relieved not to be taking the trip north, for she was quite alarmed at the barbarous appearance of the Eyran men.’

‘And the Lord of Cantara has rather been inflaming the situation,’ one of the other merchants added, intent on parading his own subtle understanding of Istrian politics.

Fabel laughed. ‘Bloody madman.’

‘Bloody rich madman,’ Gesto corrected. ‘We’ve done some fine business with Lord Tycho in the past month; I won’t have him maligned.’

‘His is not a name that is spoken lightly in this house,’ Favio Vingo said, tight-lipped.

Gesto’s hand flew to his mouth. ‘My apologies, sir: I had forgotten the unpleasant matter between yourself and the Lord of Cantara at the Fair. Something about a marriage settlement, I believe?’

Favio glared at him. ‘You should not listen to the gossip of fools,’ he said shortly. ‘The man is quite insane, and where you get the idea that he is rich, I do not know: he was clearly so desperate for funds at the Allfair that he insulted me and my family beyond point of forgiveness.’

‘With the greatest respect, I must beg to differ with you on this subject, for the Lord of Cantara paid for his purchases from us – some superb Jetran jewellery (very collectible) and an assortment of the finest gems – with ingots of pure silver. He didn’t once dicker over the price I quoted – a very fine gentleman I thought him – and he had great piles of the stuff in his revenue chests: I saw it with my own eyes.’

Favio frowned and fell silent. After a moment he said: ‘I thought you had not travelled as far as Cantara yet.’

Gesto Ardum laughed. ‘Ah, no: and with the lord away we probably shan’t venture that far south. No, it was in Cera that we met with him; and he was cutting quite a figure there. He travels with a nomad servant – a tall, strange, pale man with a black cat that he keeps on a lead: I never saw the like. Very striking.’

Someone else cut in enthusiastically: ‘A very pious man, he is, Lord Tycho Issian. Pious and patriotic’

‘Aye,’ said another of the merchants bitterly. ‘Pious and patriotic, some might say; me, I’d say he was a bigoted zealot.’

Gesto laughed politely and leaned across the table. ‘Lindo took a northern woman to wife, would you believe?’ he said softly, with an unpleasant grin. ‘He likes them a bit wild. Anyway, the Lord of Cantara arrived at court in a great whirlwind of fervour, paid off his Council debt with a flourish and has been whipping up all sorts of fury against the Eyrans ever since: says we should send ships north to “liberate” their women from the cruel yoke of their heretical religion and convert them to Falla.’

‘Liberate them into our brothels, most like!’

An ironic round of applause and table-thumping greeted this statement.

‘And is anyone listening to this nonsense?’ Fabel asked.

‘It’s been twenty years and more since we last fought them; those that remember bear grudges, and those that weren’t old enough to fight last time around fancy a bit of sport, I dare say. The ones who favour war are in a minority now; but more are listening to Tycho Issian every day.’

Favio laid aside his knife grimly. He had barely touched his food this night, or any other since the night they left the Allfair. His cheeks were haggard, the skin around his eyes dull and crinkled with new lines. ‘It pains me to agree with that upstart lord, but my son lies dying at the hands of Eyran brigands . . .’

Gesto Ardum exchanged a glance with another of the merchants, a tall, dark man with closely set eyes and a thin mouth. This man, who had never, Saro thought, given his name, looked away now, applying himself instead to the delicious platter of saffron rice and fragrant baked lamb and apricots that was the local speciality.

‘Ah, well it’s only talk just now of course,’ Gesto went on. He leant forward conspiratorially. ‘It would be a most expensive undertaking, to storm the north. Lord Palto says we simply do not have the ships for it, nor the expertise either; and to engage the services of the necessary number of renegades to forge the passage to Halbo would be costly; and not just in terms of the money—’

‘How do you mean?’ Fabel drained his goblet and sat back in his chair, his hands folded over his neat little potbelly in a parody of satisfaction. ‘Surely we have had several good years from the mines and the fields? Certainly, we’ve paid enough taxes recently for their damn coffers to be overflowing in Cera! I wonder where the hell it all goes sometimes: for it’s certainly not coming back here: the damn bridge at Costia’s been down for near on five years now!’

Gesto looked over his shoulder and around the room in the most melodramatic fashion. Then he leaned even closer to his hosts. ‘They say,’ and his eyes gleamed, ‘that there’s a significant sum missing from the treasury; that or the Lord Steward has failed to keep his records true, and he, of course, is adamant the shortfall is nothing to do with him. Threatened to resign when the books were questioned and then started ranting about some fire at the Duke of Gila’s palace last year, at which point a number of the lords all rushed around trying to mollify him. Something odd, there, Lord Palto reckons, though why anyone should bother to fire that old miser’s castle is beyond me. One way or another, though, the Supreme Council has been forced to call in debts all over the country well short of the agreed grace periods, and that’s certainly not pleased some people I could mention.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s been bad for business, that it has, and that’s without all the bizarre accidents.’

‘Accidents?’ Favio frowned.

‘One of the Duke of Galia’s barges was overturned in a flat sea off Pig Island. One minute the oarsmen were making good speed; next thing, some devil wind whipped up out of nowhere and capsized her. Damn nuisance for the Duke – lost over a hundred new slaves.’

‘Couldn’t they swim?’ Saro asked naively.

There was a bellow of laughter from around the table. Gesto choked on the lamb shank he had just inserted whole into his mouth.

‘Swim! Ha, ha! Excellent, laddie!’ He coughed and banged the table with the flat of his hand, spluttering bits of lamb everywhere. ‘Swim!’

Saro stared around bemusedly.

Fabel leant across to him and said gently: ‘It’s the leg-irons they wear, Saro: no chance of escape, see – and if the ship turns turtle . . .’

A sudden, horrible picture presented itself to him then: dozens upon dozens of terrified men and women trying to drag their limbs free of their shackles as the murky Southern Ocean claimed them amid an avalanche of broken timber and crashing water, their eyes bulging, their mouths open on silent screams, the sea rushing in to fill up every available void, whether living or inanimate . . .

By the time he had rid himself of this nightmarish vision, one of the other merchants was deep into the tale of how a caravan bearing a consignment of carpets from Circesia had been trampled by a huge herd of wild horses that seemed to be running for their lives out of the Bone Quarter.

‘Finest rugs in the world – reduced to tattered scraps!’ was his indignant closing comment; but Saro shivered: horses, running out of the deathly Bone Quarter? That was bizarre indeed.

‘I heard how a huge serpent rose up out of the Southern Emptiness and swallowed a yeka entire—’

‘Serpent!’ laughed another. ‘Ridiculous nonsense!’

‘I heard the same tale,’ piped up another of the merchants. ‘And worse.’ He regaled them with the unlikely details of how an eagle had carried off a child on the Tilsen Plain, bearing it off on vast wings to its eyrie deep in the Golden Mountains. ‘Snatched it right out of the arms of its poor mother!’ he cried. ‘Had wings as wide as this room!’

‘I saw no giant eagles when I was in the mountains; but I do know there are gouts of steam coming up out of the Red Peak,’ the unnamed dark man interrupted softly, and across the table all other conversation fell away as everyone strained to listen to him, even though a mountain emitting vapour seemed a lesser wonder than colossal serpents or immense raptors. ‘I saw such a sight myself but five days ago.’

The Red Peak was deep down in the great southern mountains. Saro wondered what the man had been doing in that strange, remote region; and how he had come to join a merchant train that had travelled from the north of the country.

‘But the Red Peak hasn’t erupted for over two hundred years!’ Fabel exclaimed.