Sorcery Rising (55 page)

The dark man cast a sardonic eye at him. ‘Maybe not –but I felt the ground move beneath my feet and I didn’t stay around to find out more. Rode my horse till its knees broke and had to buy a new nag from hillmen in the Farem Heights.’

Favio Vingo raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m surprised they’d do business with you: there’s little kindness between our people and the hill tribes.’

The dark man smiled. He reached under his cloak and drew out a pouch, which he then upended onto the table. A shower of bright stones tumbled out, the candlelight sparking off the rough crystal facets of gems as large as eyeballs.

Saro shivered. Moodstones. Even uncut and unpolished, he would recognise them anywhere.

‘Pick one up,’ the man said to Favio.

Favio reached out and selected the largest, a lump the size of a hen’s egg. Upon contact with his skin, the stone flared a deep, unnatural blue shot through with darker veins of purple. The stone in the pouch Saro wore around his neck, concealed beneath his tunic, began to throb as if in sympathy; or was it just that his heart had begun to beat loudly?

Favio dropped the stone as if it had burned him. ‘What in Falla’s fiery halls is it?’

The dark man laughed and retrieved the stone. In his palm it became a warm, rich orange that glowed like an ember. ‘The nomads call them moodstones,’ he said. ‘They cut them till they’re pretty and make them into trinkets that you can buy for your lady and judge her mood – very popular at court, I’ve heard: a powerful aid to seduction! But the hillmen around the Farem Heights call them “the Goddess’s Tears” – some tale about her weeping over a lost brother or lover or such – and say they channel her power. He went on at interminable length about their miraculous properties, the chap I got the horse from, but he gave me his finest nag for a pair of these things, so I’m not complaining.’

‘May I?’ Fabel extended his hand and the man dropped the stone into it, whereupon it lost its fire and took on a duller, ochre hue. Fabel made a face. ‘Doesn’t seem to like me much.’

The man laughed. ‘A worry on your mind, I’d say.’

Fabel gave him a sharp look and tossed the stone back to him. In the dark man’s hand it flared to life again. Then, feeling Saro’s intent gaze upon him, the man turned. ‘Here: you take it, son: see what pretty colours you can coax from it.’

Saro pushed away from the table. ‘I fear I must excuse myself!’ he said quickly, and ran from the room, clutching his mouth as if he might vomit. Behind him, he heard catcalls: ‘Make some space, lad: plenty more wine to get through yet!’ one man laughed; ‘Better get the lad in training!’ and: ‘Do you raise girls here in Altea, then, Favio?’

Out in the corridor, Saro pressed his forehead against the cool plaster on the wall and waited for his racing pulse to slow. He remembered the old nomad healer’s terror of the mood-stone he carried, how she had called it a ‘death-stone’ and how he had seen it in her mind’s eye as a white, glowing thing, quite unlike the innocuous object the dark man had them toying with at the feast-table.
I’m being a fool
, he thought.
I should have just touched the stone, watched it change colour; passed it back again and let them have their joke
.

He took this thought with him out to the privies where he relieved himself, then washed his hands and face at the ewer. Across the enclosure, an owl hooted, the sound carrying on the night air with extraordinary clarity. A moment later, the call was met by another sound – a wild, distant ululation that made the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He listened, but the noise was not repeated, and he wondered whether he might have imagined it. There had been no wolves in the hills around Altea for generations for they had been hunted into extinction in his great-grandfather’s time, and the nearest he had ever come to one was peering at the stuffed head adorning the wall of his father’s chamber, a trophy now so moth-eaten and dusty that it bore little relation to the proud living creature it had once been.

He stood out there for a few minutes, feeling jittery and out of sorts, listening to the horses whicker and shuffle in the stables, to the breeze in the poplars, and the crickets in the bushes. A short while later he heard voices and turned to see two of the merchants stumbling out of the door. Unable to make it as far as the privies, they pissed into the flowerbeds, clutching one another and laughing raucously.
Mother’s poor marigolds
, Saro thought, and felt a desperate urge to yell with laughter. He watched them stagger back inside, completely unaware of his presence, and then turned and followed them back into the house.

Inside, the noise from the hall was loud and boisterous and suddenly Saro found he did not have the stomach to return to the drinking games and lewd jokes which had undoubtedly started up in his absence. Such activities had never been his forte, and since Tanto loved to show off in the company of men as much as he did with women, it usually proved possible for Saro to slip into the background, his hands cupped around the goblet of wine he had nursed for the past hour, smiling and nodding and pretending to share the coarse humour, while he longed for the solitude of his room. Even without Tanto present, he doubted he’d be much missed. He could always say he’d passed out in the enclosure, and provide them with another laugh in the morning.

He walked quickly past the door to the feast-hall and along the cool corridor beyond, passing the solar where his mother entertained any women accompanying their guests; but it was already quiet and dark. The candles had been extinguished; though not so long ago, for he could smell the hot wax from them as he walked by. Beyond lay the guest quarters, and his brother’s chamber. He was about to set foot on the stairs when he was distracted by a sound. Someone was in Tanto’s room: he could hear the murmur of a voice rising and falling. He frowned. His mother had forbidden any but herself and her women access to her unconscious son; but the sound he could hear was a low drone – a man.

Saro crept to the doorway and hovered outside. Here, the words became more distinct.

‘Oh, Tanto, Tanto, to see you lying like this, dead to the world . . . I do not even know if you can hear me. I look for signs of life in your eyes, but they are as black and empty as the Poisoned Pools of Beria.’

A sob. It was his father, Saro realised, which caused him no great surprise.

‘When I remember you as a boy, so swift both with feet and tongue, so handsome, everyone charmed by your beauty and your energy, and now . . .’

There came a brief rustling noise, then Favio went on: ‘I must know if you are still alive in this rotting shell, my boy; I must know if you are aware of me, or even if you dream, for I do not think I can bear to watch you dying before my eyes much longer. Forgive me for disturbing this long rest, Tanto, if disturb it I do. They say the soul carries on living for long after the body has failed; but they say nothing about this living death, and I must know . . .’

Saro twitched the curtain that draped the door and saw how Favio Vingo was bending over his brother’s still form. Something in his hand throbbed out light the colour of a deep bruise.

‘Let the stone tell me what goes on beneath this cold, white brow—’

‘No, Father!’

Without a second’s thought, Saro took two strides forward to stop him, just as Favio Vingo pressed the moodstone to his son’s forehead. For a moment as it made contact with Tanto’s sweating skin, the stone pulsed a pale and sickly greyish blue; then as Saro caught his father by the shoulder, it flared to a white so brilliant it hurt the eyes; then to a powerful, coruscating gold. A bolt of pure energy coursed through Saro’s right hand, making him tighten his grasp on Favio’s shoulder until it felt as if their bones might melt together. It raged up his arm and into his head, so that he shrieked with the pain of it – a deep, scouring pain that burned as mercilessly as any pyre – and his father’s howl rose in counterpoint, agonised and terrified. It ignited the stone in the pouch around his neck so that Saro felt both moodstones like two vast, external hearts and himself a tiny seed trapped between them, filled with so much life he might just burst apart and spill it all out into the night in an incandescent rain; and a moment later their shared cry took on a third, higher note that rang and echoed off the chamber walls like a trapped animal.

With a savage vigour, Saro wrenched himself free of the contact. At once the light went out of both moodstones, throwing the chamber into such complete darkness it was as if someone had blown out the sun. He heard his father collapse onto the floor, heard his stertorous breath and a mumbled prayer: ‘Oh, Falla, oh, Falla, oh, Falla . . .’

And then another voice, pitched high with panic:

‘I’m blind! By the bitch, I’m blind!’

Twenty-two

The
Seither

T
ime passed and Katla continued to improve. By the end of the summer she could run, and ride a pony one-handed; but everything else – climbing and metal-working, swimming and fishing; even clothing herself and visiting the outhouse on her own – had become a desperate frustration.

The burns on her legs and shoulder mended to pale scars; but her right hand remained stubbornly gnarled and fistlike, the fingers fused together in an ugly mass of red-and-white scar tissue which, though she had never thought of herself as a vain person, she preferred to conceal. Small children took one look at the wound and ran away: it was upsetting, especially since others at Rockfall had taken worse injury and not attracted such attention. Kar Treefoot – so called for the wooden peg he had attached to the stump of the leg he had lost (he claimed) to a sea monster – was certainly a local curiosity; but his wound was not on view to the world, and no longer caused comment; and Grima Kallsen had been born with a dark-red stain running across her face, but her smile was still the first thing you noticed about her. Older men had scars, from the war, from horse-fights and drunken brawls and fishing accidents, it was true: but women in Rockfall rarely carried wounds, and Katla’s story had anyway carried far and wide. Taking pity on her granddaughter, Gramma Rolfsen had adapted a number of her tunics so that a long sleeve could be gathered with a leather thong to hide the nub.

Healers had come and gone, applying poultices and administering potions to the damaged arm; but none had had any effect other than to make her retch and run for the outhouse. All the while, Gramma Rolfsen had sucked her teeth and tutted over their efforts, and then one day she had caught her daughter by the elbow and whispered something to her.

‘Festrin One-Eye!’ Bera had exclaimed. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Nothing else has worked: how can it hurt?’

‘But Festrin One-Eye is a
seither
!’ Bera hissed, glancing quickly to make sure Katla had not overheard.

Katla had. ‘A
seither
? Really?’

Bera whirled around, blue eyes snapping with irritation.

‘Ears like a bat!’ Gramma cackled.

Katla had never come across a living
seither
before, though when she was twelve she had crept into the Old Howe with several other children to see the bones of the one who lay there, as a dare. Nothing had happened, though Fent had sworn he’d seen them
move
when a cloud passed across the moon; and two days later the wart Tian had had on the end of her nose had mysteriously vanished, which was surely proof of some sort of magic in the place. The bones were long, Katla remembered; attenuated and yellowed and thin and very brittle, and people said the
seither
whose skeleton it was had been an old, old man for as long as they could remember, a result of the ancient earth-magic he wielded.

‘Besides,’ Bera addressed her mother, ignoring her daughter’s outburst and with one shoulder turned resolutely to Katla as if to physically block her from the discussion, ‘how would you know how to contact Festrin One-Eye?’

Gramma tapped the side of her nose and shot her daughter a crafty look. ‘The old have their ways,’ she replied cryptically. ‘I hear we’ll be able to greet the
seither
shortly.’

‘What? Here?’ Bera drew herself up to her full five foot. Her pale skin was flushed, and two red marks had appeared on her cheeks.
Just like Fent, when he was angry
, Katla thought. And just like her twin, her mother could be remarkably pig-headed and difficult. ‘No one has informed me of this.’

Gramma Rolfsen, who was used to her daughter’s flare-ups, merely shrugged. ‘I hear Festrin is travelling with the mummers.’

High Feast was just a few days away, and even though crops in the wild and rocky Westman Isles were not usually abundant, this year the weather in the crucial last few weeks had been perfect – a period of soft rains had been followed by unseasonably warm sunshine resulting in a late surge of growth: unusually, the wheat was shoulder-high; the barley a lush pale-green swathe; and they had to prop the branches of the appletrees in the orchards at Rolf’s Dell to save them from the weight of the fruit. The seas around the islands had not been immune to this bounty, either; lately the fishermen had brought ashore line after line of pollock and bass; shoal after shoal of mackerel and herring. The drying-racks were full, the store of salt almost depleted, and the smoking-house sent billows of fragrant fumes into the air both day and night. And the fine weather had held through harvest, too, so that the barns were stuffed to overflowing. It would be a fine feast this year, which was as well, for the mummers numbered twenty or more including the musicians; and it was Rockfall’s turn to accommodate them.

Bera frowned. ‘Why didn’t Aran tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

Bera spun round to confront her husband, who had come in silently behind Katla. Many women would be intimidated by a man so large that his shoulders filled the doorway with barely an inch to spare on either side, but Bera planted her hands squarely on her narrow hips and glared up at him like a little fighting cat.

‘That the mummers think to bring a
seither
with them this year.’

Aran’s eyes darted guiltily to his mother-by-law and Katla watched her grandmother’s gap-toothed grin widen challengingly and immediately read the situation.