The Amber Legacy (37 page)

‘Greedy bastard. Booty like this should be shared around.’

‘I’ll tell him you said that.’

‘Fuck you.’

Somehow she found the strength to climb the steps with the rough aid of the sailors, half comprehending
their chatter, half wanting to vanish. The cool evening was as soothing as cold water in the morning on her face, and she was glad to breathe fresh air after the close stench of the bilge. Her captors led her to the rail of the ship in the mixture of moonlight and lantern light, and made her climb down the rope into a small rowboat. She went without a fuss, too addled by the seasickness and the shock of events to protest, and she sat in silence as the oarsmen rowed towards the boom of waves rolling onto the beach. The sailors hauled the boat onto the shore, and they guided Meg out onto the sand. They offloaded boxes and crates. As the crew climbed back into the boat, one sailor said gruffly, ‘That’s it, girlie. Welcome to your new home.’

‘It has been written many times that out of
misfortune can come fortune, that out of the
ashes will rise the new tree, that after the floods
the world is reborn under a rainbow.
Look upon every adversity as an opportunity to
divest yourself of the past and commence anew.
Consider it as a gift to you, and you will see
beyond your immediate miseries to the
possibilities in waiting.’

FROM
The Word
,
CHAPTER SEVEN
,
LESSON 23
,
ACCORDING TO ERIN THE WISE

W
aves washed against the sand. Hermit crabs scampered across the flat rocks from pool to pool, dodging the seagulls whirling above them in search of morsels. She sat on the beach, wrapped in her sorrow, staring out to sea. Jon was gone. Her baby was gone.

She’d huddled all night between the crates the sailors had left on the beach, numbed from the chill by her fathomless grief. She slept fitfully, and dreamed, but the fragments were incomprehensible to her now. She’d woken at sunrise to the rattle of the ship’s anchor chain in the still air, and ghostly voices calling orders through the mist, and only then did she realise that she’d been taken to a strange place and abandoned. Cold, desolate in her soul, she watched the sails unfurl and the ship turn as a gentle breeze drove it out to sea.

Her gaze wandered to a small dark object bobbing in the shallows, rising and falling as the waves swept by, heading for the shore. Curious, she walked along the beach to the point where the swimming creature would land.
Coming
formed as an image and a feeling in her mind. Whisper! The bush rat rode the last wave to the sand and waddled out of the ocean, weighed
down by her sodden black fur, and stopped at Meg’s feet. ‘Whisper!’ Meg gasped with elation, as she scooped up the rat. And she stared in astonishment. Around the rat’s neck, dangling ludicrously from her sodden body was the amber crystal necklet. ‘Where did you get this?’ she whispered in awe, afraid to take the crystal in case it was an illusion. She held Whisper in her left hand and gingerly lifted the thin gold chain off the little animal. Then she kissed the rat on the nose. Whisper immediately started grooming her face. ‘I don’t believe this,’ Meg said, staring at the crystal and at Whisper. ‘No one would believe this.’
Dry
, the rat projected, and shifted restlessly in Meg’s palm. Meg lowered Whisper, and the rat waddled onto the soft sand and immediately set to drying and preening herself. Meg glanced nervously out to sea, expecting to see the ship returning, but it was out of sight. ‘I wish you could tell me how you got the necklet off the Seer,’ she said aloud, ‘and how you got on the ship.’ Whisper stopped preening and looked up at Meg with her dark eyes. She shook and returned to her methodical task.

The crates and boxes were as much of a surprise as Whisper’s arrival when Meg opened them. One contained the meagre set of clothes Meg had packed for her journey. Four crates were full of books—texts from the Royal library, written in ancient languages. She recognised some that she had already read, and others that came from the same collections. On the top of the books in the third crate she discovered a vellum scroll. Unrolled, it was a note to her. ‘All that is an abomination in the eyes of Jarudha must be purged from the kingdom of his true believers. You are such an abomination. So, too, are these books, brought into our kingdom by the ignorance of the Royals. Like you,
these books do not belong in Shess. Perhaps they will amuse you in your isolation.’ At the base of the note was a direct quotation from
The Word:
‘Beware the lies of those who would conjure without faith, for they know only darkness and cannot find the true path.’

Meg sat on the sand to contemplate the events that had engulfed her. For certain, Follower Servant, the Intermediary, was the person responsible for betraying the Queen’s confidence. He possibly even coordinated the attempts against Meg’s life. His convenient killing of the Elite leader supported that theory. The connection with Seer Truth suggested that he was also active in the rebellion against the Queen—a supporter of the Queen’s eldest son, Future? So what had happened to Queen Sunset last night? Did they attack her as well? Or was the intention to tell her lies about Meg’s whereabouts and health? If so, why? To make the Queen feel vulnerable? Were the Rebels biding their time, plotting another attempt at taking control when they were strengthened again? And why had they taken Jon? Could they possibly know the truth about his father? Overwhelmed by the wave of emotions that swamped her, she collapsed on the sand and cried for the loss of her son.

The island took her half a day to traverse in any direction, and she was fascinated to be surrounded by the ocean. The landscape was hilly, rocky and thickly wooded—a mixture of mallee, gum and pine—and there were plentiful small marsupials and birds for her to trap. Growing up in her farming community, she had rudimentary survival skills and knew what could be eaten and where fresh water might be found. Three small creeks ran through shallow valleys, and although none were perennial, two cut through rock in their seaward journeys, leaving freshwater billabongs for the local fauna.

She covered a gap in a tumble of granite boulders with branches and leaves to create a sizable shelter, and used water from a nearby billabong to daub the construction with mud to bind the vegetation. She knew heavy rains would destroy her work if she was still on the island beyond Fuar, but she also hoped to have built something more substantial by then. She carted her books and precious few belongings to her shelter and set up home.

She lost count of the days and nights. Hunting and fishing, talking to Whisper, slowly building a stronger shelter and reading filled her time. In the first days, between long bouts of depression and loneliness and grief for Jon, she anticipated the sails of the ship appearing on the horizon, returning with Seer Truth to reclaim the amber necklet. He would have been mortified to discover the necklet missing, and she wanted desperately to know how Whisper had so effectively retrieved it without being caught. She focussed on trying to build communication with the rat, but it seemed Whisper only understood emotional images and images of objects. Their conversations were restricted to fundamental needs.
Hungry
, the rat would tell her, and vanish to eat.
Hot
, she would express, and slink under a cool rock ledge.
Sleep
came often. What Meg did learn gradually were the nuances in the rat’s language. Danger and fear were expressed according to the source and level of danger. So Whisper said
Careful
when a hawk hovered overhead on its hunting search. Meg knew
Run
meant exactly what the rat projected it to mean. The source of danger was too near and too nasty. The simplicity of the communication gradually bored her, although she enjoyed playing a fetch game with Whisper. She would think
Stick
or
Pebble
and Whisper would bring the item and drop it at her feet and wait for another instruction, projecting an image that could only be translated as
Fun. Again.

But she regretted learning animal communication the first time she caught a possum in a pit trap. The sun was rising on the eastern ocean horizon and mist wreathed the low island hills when she went to check her traps a few days after arriving. As she reached the tiny space under the trees where her pit trap was set, she felt the possum’s fear in her mind. The images of darkness and panic, indecipherable as words, were overwhelming. A desperate animal realised it was going to die. The impact of the possum’s psychic cry stopped her and she had to fight welling tears. At her feet, Whisper sat up, sniffing the air nervously and flinching, as if emotional arrows were hitting her, and she was reluctant to go any closer to the trap.

When Meg composed her emotions, she went to the trap and peered in. The possum, crouched at the bottom of the slender hole, looked up and the images of fear were superimposed with something akin to astonishment. As hungry as she was for something more than nuts, berries, yams and crabs, she realised she was going to have to kill a creature that could speak to her in its simple way—an animal that knew fear and happiness and sensed its fate. It would be like killing Whisper. Or Sunfire. She found a branch and pushed it into the pit, before retreating into the bushes and waiting. The possum warily emerged, sniffed the ground quickly and bolted into the undergrowth. ‘Fish and birds,’ she muttered, looking down at Whisper, ‘and I’d better not learn if they can communicate.’

The books that Seer Truth and his colleagues had dumped with her gave purpose to her long and lonely days. At first she read at random, feeling the magical tingle along her spine each time that she began decoding the languages and discovering how the attitudes of people in different lands varied towards magic. Some writers told stories of how magic was
banned and the practitioners killed in wild frenzies by the magic haters. Other books described societies with unequivocal reverence for people they called wizards and witches and sorceresses, in some cases to the point where they held the greatest authority. She read tales of fabulous creatures that could breathe fire, cast magic and fly: stories of mighty heroes whose exploits were legendary in every sense of the word; tragic stories of the downfall of empires. Most were histories, although their facts seemed more akin to the content of ballads than to accurate recording.

She reorganised the books into categories of origin and confirmed that there were five main sources. Three of the thickest tomes were written in the language of the Ashuak Empire, the place to the east where a great library existed. There were several thin texts written over a very long period in a language belonging to a nation of people who called themselves the Ranu Ka Shehaala. The oldest collection was five books written in variations of languages from the Andrakian kingdom, which appeared to have collapsed a millennium ago. A fourth set of books was written in the language of a society called the Alfyn. The remaining books, some thirteen, were an eclectic collection from small countries and cities, in a variety of languages.

As she catalogued her library, she discovered rare and potent books, like
Doorways
, a Ranu Ka Shehaala text that meticulously described the making and casting of portal magic. There was a fascinating text by an Ashuak who called himself Erin Vekesh, titled
The Dark Spells
, detailing a host of magical incantations the author called ‘Spells of Unmaking’, which she put aside to read. She rehearsed spells, learning how to generate a variety of fires, create illusions, float small objects in the air, change the shape of objects, unravel ropes, undo the effect of simple spells and make objects cease to exist.

And she found one spell in an Alfyn text that made the hair on the nape of her neck rise—a spell for embedding slivers of the Genesis Stone in living creatures. She read and reread the spell, memorising its sequence and practising the possible cadences, until she believed that she had the recipe. She knew her enemies wanted the amber. If Seer Truth came back to the island he would take it from her. But what if he couldn’t find it? What if she embedded it in herself? She considered the concept for three days, arguing with herself over the advantages and disadvantages, the risks, struggling to sleep at night because she was wrestling with the conundrum. If she embedded the crystal, and Truth found out, would he cut it from her? On the third morning she reread the text to answer her nagging concerns—and decided.

She walked in the brilliant late morning sunlight to a slab of granite where she often sat, staring out to sea. She stripped off her tunic and trousers, unhitched the amber crystal necklet and detached the crystal from the thin chain, before she lay on the warm rock on her back. She pressed the crystal against her chest beneath her hands and closed her eyes, feeling the sun’s warmth against her eyelids, and she began a low, steady rhythmic hum, mimicking what she’d read in the Alfyn text. In breathy intervals, uttering the Alfyn words in the same resonant tone as her hum, she incanted the ancient embedding spell.
‘Ashan
—
sha-ashan
—
aron-ta
—
sha-ashan
—
vor-ta
—
sha-ashan
…’ Sweat beaded on her skin, and her mouth began to go dry from her chanting. The sun’s heat stung her flesh. And she felt a sharp stab of pain through her chest, deep, through her heart and lungs, through her back—pain so bitter that she broke her incantation with a gasp and yelped. Her eyes snapped open and she stared at the bright blue sky. And she couldn’t move.

The stars winked at her. She shivered. It took her a long time to remember where she was. Her last conscious memory was of pain and sunlight. She sat up. The half-moon painted her skin white. When she touched her chest with her fingers, expecting to find the amber crystal in her cleavage, her skin was smooth. She checked in her lap, and on the rock, but the sliver was gone. Her fingers returned to her chest, and when she studied her skin in the pale moonlight she noticed a thin discolouration between her breasts. She shuddered with exhilaration. The embedding spell worked! She cupped her hands and her spine tingled as a sphere of white light formed effortlessly in her palms. She willed the sphere to hover above her head, as she climbed down from the rock and slipped into her clothes. She paused to touch the thin mark on her chest before lacing up her tunic. No one could take the crystal from her ever again. It was part of her.

She read the Ranu Ka Shehaala
Doorways
text over and over, and searched the other books for spells and stories associated with portals. She remembered the Targan book by Lady Tarnyss, found it, and studied the section on portals. Another book,
Lore of the Alfyn
, detailed how to target a portal so that it sent the traveller to a precise point. She also learned how to make a portal close as she passed through, preventing pursuit. What she read seemed utterly impossible to her logical mind, but so had so much else before now. And each spell she practised, when it worked, surprised her less and less as she accepted the reality of magic.

Days became cycles. The dry heat of Fuszash waned into humidity. Brief dark storms limped across the ocean from the southwest, and bruised clouds dissolved into cool rain. Her red hair thickened and lengthened,
and she lost weight on her vegetarian and fish diet while Whisper grew fatter. The discoloured patch between her breasts became a thin amber-coloured scar, conspicuous against her dark suntanned skin. She cried for Jon some rainy nights in the cold comfort of her shelter, but the pain of her loss was becoming more a dull ache with the passing of time.