The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (4 page)

‘Yeah, as far as I know. But don’t get your hopes up, Blaze. It’s not doing any unlawful business.’

I changed the subject. ‘Do you know anything about a Straggler citizen called Tor Ryder? Or about a good-looking young man who calls himself Noviss?’

He shook his head. ‘I know the two you mean, but God only knows where they fit in. Neither of them are in the common line of visitor, any more than the Cirkasian beauty is. And I don’t know where
you
fit in either. I wish you’d tell me more—’

‘I’ve nothing to do with any of this. My only interest is in the purchase of a slave.’ At least, that was what I’d thought when I arrived; I was no longer quite so sure.

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Ah—you’re probably right not to trust me too far. I have a reputation for keeping secrets, for being reliable—but faced with dunmagic, I’d sell my soul to the Devil, my mother to a brothel, and my friends into slavery, you along with them.’ He shrugged. ‘Niamor always comes first with Niamor.’

I believed him. ‘Wise man.’

‘Look out, there’s someone coming.’ He bent down to kiss me again, shielding me with his body so that whoever it was wouldn’t be able to see me. I would have laughed if I’d been in a position to do so; he was obviously very anxious not to be seen consorting with a halfbreed who might later be recognised as one of the Awarefolk.

A couple of drunken sailors walked by. When we surfaced for air some time later, he said, ‘Lord, Blaze, you’re almost enough to make a man think of settling down—’

‘Almost,’ I repeated dryly, and he had the grace to laugh.

‘Be careful, firebrand,’ he said. ‘I’d hate something to happen to you, I would.’ He smiled a farewell and disappeared into the darkness.

The rest of that night I spent in a succession of bars and shabby holes where the swillie was barely drinkable, the company barely tolerable, and the information non-existent. No one knew where I could buy a Cirkasian slave. The slavers themselves, usually so very eager to make a sale, simply shrugged and said they had no such merchandise. When I tracked down a few more of the seamen from the slaver ship that had come in from Cirkase the day before, hoping they would open up now that they were away from the ship’s officers, not one of them admitted to having had a Cirkasian female on board, alive or otherwise. I tried bribery, I tried making them drunk, I tried tricking them into saying what they didn’t want to say—and got nowhere. Maybe they were too scared to talk. Maybe they’d had a dunmagic seal on the subject placed on their lips. Probably the latter; around every single one of them I caught the sickening whiff of the red magic…

I set off for
The Drunken Plaice
before dawn, and almost didn’t get there at all. Of course, having made it quite clear that I had enough money to pay for a prime quality slave (a lie), I suppose I must have looked like a plump sea-trout for the gutting. Few men expected a woman to be able to fight, and fewer still expected anyone at all to be able to stave off six armed thugs.

However, I didn’t carry a sword for nothing. I was well-trained, and nothing if not experienced, in the art of street skirmishing, and I had the advantage of carrying a Calmenter blade.

A Calmenter sword is at least a hand-span longer than an ordinary sword and you have to be tall to be able I wear it, let alone fight with it. Even someone as tall as I was had to wear it in a harness on the back and reach for it across the shoulder. If it had been forged from ordinary steel, it would have been too heavy to wield properly, but Calmenter steel was actually a secret alloy as light and as sharp as the double-edged shaft of a horned-marlin, and even more deadly. I could make it sing when I put my mind to it.

And being attacked by six men on a darkened street put my mind to it.

They came at me out of a side alley with their swords already drawn, all six of them together, which was their first mistake. I could see from the clumsy way they crowded themselves that they lacked training. I half turned as if to run, which enticed the nearest of them into a lunging attack. Then, instead of fleeing as he expected, I side-stepped his thrusting blade and brought the heel of my left hand up into his nose—hard. Before the others had time to react, I had my sword in my right hand and was driving it past the body of this first assailant and into the chest of the second. With his view blocked by his friend, the second man never saw it coming and died on the spot. I hadn’t really expected to kill him, as the thrust had been more or less blind, but he was undoubtedly dead.

I stepped back, and so did the others. The first man was clutching at his face, his eyes blurred with tears, blood pouring out from beneath his fingers. He reeled, half stunned, and was out of the fight. The other four hesitated, more cautious now. I demoralised them still further with a showy display of swordplay, weaving the blade back and forth through the air, smiling ferociously as I did so. It was all playacting, but in the dim light I hoped it looked formidable; if the sword had been made of Souther steel, I would hardly have been able to lift it in one hand, let alone make it dance. At the same time, I manoeuvred myself so that I had the wall of the building at my back and they couldn’t approach me from behind.

When they attacked again, it was half hearted. They were still getting in one another’s way, and their inept hacking was easily countered by my long Calmenter blade. Inevitably one of them made a mistake; a clumsy attack that I first turned aside, then followed up by tucking the point of my sword between his sword hilt and his fingers. His sword sprang from his hand and his fingers ran with blood. It was hardly a major wound, but the sight of more blood was all it took to end the fight.

‘I’m off,’ one of them growled. ‘You didn’t blasted tell me she could blasted
fight
!’

There was a murmur of agreement from two of the others, and the three of them retreated into the gloom of the side alley. The fellow with the bloodied nose had long since gone.

The remaining man glared at me. I made a move with my sword in his direction and he backed off some more, trying to look as if he wasn’t hurrying. A moment later he too disappeared into the alley. When I looked around the corner there was no sign of any of them.

I might have continued to think that it had been just another ordinary robbery attempt if I hadn’t seen the nose on that last man: it was as large and as squashily knobbled as a sea-potato. Teffel, the brawn without brain.

There was nothing in the dead man’s pockets and I left him cluttering up the street, showing a lack of civic consciousness that was not unusual in Gorthan Spit; it was a rare night when the streets weren’t decorated with a body or two. In fact, they had a sort of unwritten rule: only scavengers who stripped a body of its clothes were obliged to dispose of it, which usually meant throwing it into the ocean on an outgoing tide. Incoming tides sometimes washed the bones back, but not much else.

Back in my room, I went to bed thinking of sleep, only to find that my young neighbour had evidently made a fine recovery from the dunmagic with the aid of his sylvmagicking friend. By the sound of it, patient and healer had embarked on a night of lovemaking to remember for all time. They had endurance, I’ll say that for them. They were still at it at dawn, which was when I finally fell asleep.

The next day I went to the main wharf where the slaver ship from Cirkase was still docked. I wanted to see if it was possible to sneak on board and search it. Not a brilliant idea, but my only other one was worse: break into the Gorthan Spit slave-holding house and have a look at the merchandise—without an official guide who might not have shown me all there was to be seen. It was just as well that in the end events overtook me and I never got around to doing either of these foolhardy things.

When I arrived at the dock, it was clear that something was happening. The place was crowded with onlookers—I saw Tunn the tapboy and Janko the waiter from
The Drunken Plaice
not to mention the sylv Cirkasian beauty, all in my first glance around. A moment later, I spotted two of the Fellih-worshippers Niamor had mentioned; it was hard to mistake them with those ridiculous hats and oversized bows tied under their chins. Besides, they towered over most people because the heels and soles of their shoes were a hand-span high. I’d been told when I was on Mekaté that they wore them because the being they worshipped, Fellih, required his followers to be clean. They thought shoes like that raised them above the dirt of the world and kept them pure.

Call it religion, and people will believe the most ridiculous things. Why, I remember that on Fen Island, there were marsh dwellers who made human sacrifices to will-o’-the-wisps, believing they were ancestral gods who had to be placated. So I went to have a look for myself, and you know what they were, those will-o’-the-wisp lights? Marsh gases! Stamp on the ground, the bog shivers, and out leaks the gas, glowing in the dark. And people were
dying
for that! But I digress.

There were also quite a few of Gorthan Docks’ more respectable inhabitants on the wharf, as well as the usual pickpockets, crazies and beggars who haunted every crowd that ever gathered anywhere on the Spit. I had some trouble shaking off a halfwit who, for no logical reason that I could see, grabbed the scabbard of my sword and then wouldn’t let go. A little later I glimpsed Niamor; he was talking to a man I knew to be a paid assassin wanted in at least four islandoms for murder. I wondered if Niamor’s negotiating skills included arranging assassinations. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

The cause of the crowd was obvious: a ship was on its way in. There wasn’t all that much normal traffic through Gorthan Docks (any sane mariner with legitimate business avoided the place with the same dedication they devoted to avoiding a whirlstorm), so I supposed any off-island ship would have excited some attention. However, I had an idea that this one attracted more interest than usual.

I didn’t need to see the flag, or the name,
Keeper Fair,
to know whose ship it was; I recognised the vessel from its design: the high poop deck, the raked masts, the cut-off stern—only Keepers built ships like that. The red flag, with its sleek white horned-marlin and Keeper motto: ‘Equality, Liberty and Right’, was an unnecessary confirmation.

‘Now what the spitting-fish are those meddling sods doing here again so soon?’ a voice said in my ear.

I didn’t turn around or acknowledge him; I knew Niamor wouldn’t appreciate having everyone see us talking to one another again so soon. ‘Their job, I suppose,’ I murmured, bristling as I always did when people criticised the Keepers.

‘Job? What job? Why can’t they mind their own damn business? Bloody self-appointed lawmen of the Isles of Glory, pretending they’re here for our own good. We don’t want them. The rest of the world doesn’t want them. Or need them. Keepers of Equality?
Them?
Of reaction, perhaps! Liberty and Right? Insensitivity and might, more like. Arrogant brass-lovers.’ He sounded both bitter and impassioned. I was so astonished that I did in fact turn to look at him; he shrugged sheepishly, embarrassed at being caught showing that he did in fact care about something other than his own well being. ‘Oh well,’ he added, laughing, ‘what does it matter? As long as they don’t interfere with me, why should I worry?’

I didn’t reply, but I knew his comments on Keepers were typical of common-folk attitudes. The powerful were always hated, no matter how much they did for others. And the Keepers had done much: they had wiped out most of the piracy and much of the slave trade that had once been prevalent throughout the Isles of Glory; they had regulated trade and licensed the flow of commodities, and they now patrolled the tradeways between the island nations to prevent smuggling; they had enforced obedience to certain laws throughout the islands, laws that covered everything from shipping safety to the ban on cross-island marriage and breeding. I didn’t agree with all they did, but it should have been clear to even the most shrimp-brained that the Isles of Glory had become less chaotic, that there was more personal security, more safety, since the Keeper Isles had extended their economic and legal dominance so widely.

The ship came in under sail and bumped against the dock as gently as a rowboat on a jetty. A typical piece of Keeper seamanship; there was very little the Keepers did badly. Just a look at the vessel was enough to know that they were special: the woodwork gleamed, the sails were unpatched, the ropes were neatly coiled, the brass shone, there were rat-barriers on the hawsers. A greater contrast to the shabby, foetid slaver tied up beside them couldn’t have been imagined. And then there were the Keepers themselves: men and women in about equal numbers, tall and proud, ignoring ordinary mortals like the rest of us. And as always, my heart hurt just to look at them. Those pale golden skins, the rich auburn hair, the violet eyes…how many times had I ached to look like that, to be one of them. To wear the red cape they called a chasuble, with its white horned-marlin motif, as did all those on official service to the Keeper Council. To be a Keeper. To have sylvmagic, as a quarter of all Keeper citizens did.

Damn those unknown parents of mine who’d dumped their crying toddler in a cemetery in The Hub, the Keeper capital. Dumped their forbidden halfbreed in the one land that would inspire envy in her, to be raised, ultimately, among people she could never aspire to emulate.
Damn you both, Mama and Papa, whoever you were.

A Keeper woman threw out the first of the lines; it came coiling down into the waiting hands of a dockside brat who ran to throw the loop over the bollard. She was about as pregnant as a woman can be without actually giving birth: her belly thrust tightly against her chasuble. I’d met her once before, and remembered that there was some sort of scandal about her marriage, but I couldn’t recall the details. I was still trying to dredge up the memory when my attention was diverted to the middle-aged man who came up onto the poop deck and leant against the railing to watch the final docking. His auburn hair had greyed along the sides, making him seem more distinguished, at least superficially, than his companions. His eyebrows arched steeply to give him a perpetually cynical expression, which somehow added to his aura of authority. The chasuble he wore was gold-edged and proclaimed his rank in the Keeper hierarchy: Councillor, one of the elected governing council. That was about as high as you could go in the Keeper Isles, unless you were elected Keeperlord. The Keeperlord ruled the Isles, but not with absolute power or by hereditary right as the other Islandlords did elsewhere; the Keeperlord had to be elected, first to the Keeper Council by Keeper citizens, and then by the Councilmembers to the post. Once elected, he was answerable to the Council.

The Councillor’s glance drifted out over the crowd and met mine. His expression did not change one iota, and I thought—with shock—that he had known I would be there. I doubted that my expression was as static; he was the last person I had expected to see and doubtless my face betrayed my surprise. Someone of Syr-sylv Duthrick’s status did not normally leave The Hub, let alone the Keeper Isles.

I turned abruptly and left the dock. I went straight back to
The Drunken Plaice.
Oddly enough, just as I reached the top of the inn stairs, I saw the Cirkasian go into her room; she must have left the wharf in about as much of a hurry as I had. I wondered what had sent her scurrying back. She, as both a practitioner of sylvmagic and as a purebred Cirkasian, could at least have met the Keepers as equals. Unlike me, nameless halfbred Fen-cum-Souther brat. No pedigree, no sylvmagic, nothing to recommend me but Awareness, the one thing that had bought me a precarious semi-respectability, the one thing that had ensured I wasn’t thrown out of the Keeper Isles the day I was old enough to fend for myself.

I lay down on my bed and waited. I knew they’d find me if they wanted me. After all, in Gorthan Docks there was only one inn that was anywhere near bearable.

And while I waited, I thought about Syr-sylv Duthrick.

###

We’d first come across one another when I was about eight. Duthrick wasn’t a Councillor then; he was just a Keeper in Council service, a fairly lowly secretary, but with large ambitions. I was living on the streets of The Hub with a group of other outcasts, mainly children of varying ages. Our home was the old graveyard on Duskset Hill, where once upon a time the wealthy of the city had buried their dead in tombs above the ground. The place was ancient, the tombs neglected. They made good hiding places, fine homes for a pack of feral street kids with no money and no respectability and, at least in my case, no history or citizenship. There were a couple of adults living there as well: an old crazy-crone who collected rubbish to sell, and an elderly beggarman who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak. We kids worked for them; it was the only way we had to survive. If we worked, we were fed, it was as simple as that.

My earliest memories were of that place, the cemetery…of being passed from one person to another, of being neglected, of being cold and hungry and alone. I soon learned that the best person to look after me was me.

The day I met Duthrick, I was out in the streets with a couple of boys from Duskset Hill, earning some extra coppers scraping sea-pony slime from the roadway in front of some fancy Hub houses. A party of Keeper sylvs came past on foot, on their way to visit one of the residents. I had long since realised that I saw the world differently from other people: the silver-blue of sylvmagic and the illusions woven by sylvs were as obvious to me as a rainbow in the sky is to most people. I didn’t know what my ability was called and was totally unaware that there were other people in the world who could view sylvmagic the same way I did. Up until then, I had no idea I could also see dunmagic, although I had heard about the red magic. Like everyone else, we had grown up fearing it, fearing those who practised it, scared that one day we’d actually come face to face with it, even though we never did. Dunmagic was the bogeyman…feared, but also somewhat unreal.

Until that day, when a dunmaster attacked the sylv group. He was probably after a particular one of them, most likely the Councillor who ran the Keeper Guard at the time. As the dunmaster walked past, he cast his spells… I saw them, horrible, reeking, red-brown things crawling along the ground towards the unsuspecting group. I may not have ever seen dunmagic before, but I
knew
what it must be. Nothing else could have smelled so…so
wrong.
I screamed out a warning because, of course, none of the sylvs could see it.

I yelled, ‘Dunmagic! Dunmagic!’ Wards of sylvmagic went up instantly all over the place, shimmering and beautiful, drawing strength from one another. They were like sheets of semi-translucent glass spun between bluish poles of twisting light, always shifting, always dancing with silver sparkles, just as sunlight dances on water. Brownish-red flared into crimson against the first of the silver-blue walls, but was unable to penetrate. In fury, the dunmaster flung a spell at me, which didn’t have any effect—except that I threw up. At the same time, one of the sylvs suddenly doubled up, hit by a dunmagic sore that had managed to seep through an incomplete ward;
that
they could all see. There was bedlam for a while as sylvs panicked, and the dunmaster might have been able to flee, except for Duthrick. He’d been one of the group around the Councillor Guard, and he grabbed my arm, twisted it painfully and said, ‘
Who’s sending it,
you snotty-nosed grub?’

I pointed at the man, and the sylvs dealt with him en masse, while I stood rigid with shock, watching. You can’t harm someone with sylvmagic, but you can bewilder him with illusion. And then you can stab him to death as he lies there on the road, trying desperately to ward off attacks by monsters that don’t exist and guardsmen who aren’t real. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

The Councillor, unhurt, came across to speak to Duthrick and me. He pressed a coin into my hand, thanked me for what I had done, and said to Duthrick, ‘A splendid example of what I have been saying for years: we need the services of Awarefolk.’ Ignoring Duthrick’s scowl, he added, ‘Child, you are now in the service of the Keeper Council. Duthrick—see to it.’ He strode away, leaving Duthrick and me looking at each other with mutual distaste.

I didn’t have any choice in what happened next.

Duthrick gave the orders; I obeyed.

In the end, he sent me off to a Menod brotherhood school for the poor, run by a few elderly patriarchs on the outskirts of The Hub. It wasn’t much of an establishment. The first thing the brothers did was bathe me—and, of course, found out I was female, a fact that Duthrick had failed to ascertain. I was promptly packed off to their female counterparts at the Menod sisterhood school. It was a humourless place in a dark, grim building, run by women who seemed more interested in cleanliness than happiness. I hated it, and ran away several times. Each time, Duthrick was dispatched to bring me back, and our antipathy for each other grew. The sisters tried to teach me to sit down, sit still, shut up and do things like sew. Eventually they—and Duthrick—gave up and sent me back to the brotherhood school.