The Unmaking (32 page)

~~~

“What’s happening to her?” Rom asked his mother, horrified. The sky was full of screaming ravens. Eliza knelt in the sand in a cloud of beating wings, her hands clenched around the head of the felled Kwellrahg, her eyes rolled back in her head. She was gasping for breath as if someone was strangling her, her body rigid and shaking. Choked words burst out of her intermittently. The wizard knelt by her, eyes closed, brow furrowed, while the Sorma looked on in awed silence.

“She is working Magic,” said Lai.

“Stop her,” said Rom. “It’s hurting her!”

The Sorma looked uncertain. Rom pushed past them to his daughter, tried to catch her by the shoulder and shake her free. A charge like electricity surrounded her and sent him stumbling back, rattled to his very bones. The ravens swarmed about him, shrieking angrily. He could not lay a hand on her.

“Eliza!” he shouted. “Come back to me!”

She was choking now, not breathing at all, her arms and hands twitching in tiny spasms, as if something unseen was squeezing out her last breath.

“Eliza!”

He felt a hand on his trouser leg and looked down. Rea had crawled after him from the tent and he hadn’t heard her. She looked up at him, hollow-eyed.

“Don’t distract her,” she said. “You can’t help.”

Rom stared at his wife and then back at his struggling daughter.
Again, he thought, once again I am of no use at all to Eliza.

~~~

The snarl of darkness swallowed Eliza, pressing hard on her heart. Inside it, she could feel the deep Magic, too intricate, too complete for one such as her to unravel. Always, in the end, she came up against her own limits, and that was where she would remain now. In the place where she could do nothing because she was not strong enough. The thing carried her beyond space, to a place that was not a place but rather collapse.
I’m going to leave you by the river, little girl
. What river?
A thick darkness that will carry you between the paws of the Guardian and then no more, no more, no more
. She is almost relieved.
Look at that unhappy man in the desert, he is worried about his daughter. He doesn’t understand how vast it is, what a brief sliver of life we have in any case.
Her tooth snags what feels like a loose thread, she takes it between her teeth and pulls.
I won’t go to the river. You were not Made perfect. She is only a Sorceress after all, strong though she may be. I can unravel you.
The thing twists about her neck like a noose and hangs her from the top of the universe but she doesn’t need to breathe anymore. She only needs to pull the thing between her teeth until the noose loosens, comes at her like a snake. They fall into the wizard’s Magic and he holds them fast as they struggle there. She pulls the name, she pulls it and pulls it, beyond endurance, this is all there is. And, at last, a slackening, a kind of surrender. The Kwellrahg gives it up with a groan or a sigh. The young Sorceress lies flat on the sand, hands still gripping it, and the ravens cover her like a blanket. No, she cannot sleep, not yet. She hears her own voice again, good, she knows the words, she knows them, they are part of the fabric of everything. She takes the name and gives him another. Then he belongs to her.

~~~

“Silver is the best conduit,” said Lai. In a basket they had tens of silver needles threaded with silver fine as hair. The ends of these threads were wound through rough gemstones.

“What will the stones do?” asked Eliza.

“They are not all stones,” said Lai. She picked up a rough shard of something black. “This is petrified wood, for calming fear. Here, amethyst and jade for quieting and soothing. Lapis for cooling and drawing out heat. For quieting temper, coral. Serpentine is for healing. We are ready.”

All night the Sorma toiled on the thing Eliza and Uri Mon Lil had named the Urkleis. At times he began to struggle or groan but Eliza stopped him with a sharp command and he obeyed her. With the silver needles and silver thread, the Sorma bound his torn flesh and broken bones. Each needle in the end found its way to his centre and was driven into the black rock Nia had made, the life-giving core of the Urkleis. The healers burned herbs and sang as they worked. The Urkleis became more and more docile, until at last as dawn broke he moved not at all. As the positive and soothing elements the Sorma introduced flowed through the beast, the flesh and bone began to fall away from the centre. Soon his body was a burning heap. Eliza reached into the fire and took out the hard rock, the thing Nia had made and that she had renamed. She removed the silver needles and put it in her pocket.

“Bury the body with the gems, somewhere safe,” said Eliza to her grandmother.

“It shall be done,” said Lai, and the Sorma said “
Arash
.”

Chapter

~19~

T
ariro greeted the human visitors graciously
and granted them permission to visit her mines. She had never seen humans before and she was interested but not much impressed. The man was unpleasant to look at, ill-shaped, with lines on his face and tufts of grey in his hair. She assumed this was the result of his age; she had heard that advancing years ravaged human bodies and minds in terrible ways, making them weak and confused and prone to illness until they died and decayed. She did not like the boy, either. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and looked wary, without showing any of the amazement that was written so clearly on the faces of the other two humans. There was something not quite right about him, though she could not put her finger on it. The man and the girl, to her satisfaction, stared in awe at the giant carved pillars soaring skyward to a vaulting roof, at herself seated on an ornate throne at the top of a flight of marble steps, gleaming with jewels, her fine dress spread out around her, the cliff plunging behind her. But though she found herself disliking the old man and the boy, it was the girl she watched anxiously as the little group made their way down the mountainside. If human age was a horrifying sight to the ageless faeries, human youth was tantalizing.
This girl was in the full bloom of it, fresh-faced and glossy-haired, glowing with that strange combination of fragility and passion that marked all mortals.
There were many songs and stories about Faeries who fell in love with young mortals and, although the lesson was always that these unions ended badly, their attraction remained undeniable. There was something so moving in their inevitable deaths, and they seemed so very much of the earth, so real. She saw Jalo’s pleasure in this young girl, the tenderness of his gaze on her when she curtseyed awkwardly to Tariro. They were to leave tomorrow
–
good. She could not allow her promising younger son to fall in love with a human girl.

Tariro was in any case distracted by other matters and was glad to see them go. Her husband, Nikias, had been summoned with great secrecy by Alvar, Lord of the Faery Guard, and had been gone for two days now. Tariro had invented a pretext to visit Leanda, the wife of the First Advisor Emyr. Leanda told her that Emyr was away tending to business for a short while but Tariro sensed her anxiety. Something was afoot and Tariro hated not knowing what. Her only consolation was that Leanda did not know what it was either.

Although the Faery Kingdom was very much a patriarchy, Tariro was one of the rare female Faeries to have obtained a degree of power in her own right. Though she did not herself come from an important family, she had made her connections wisely. Her wit, her intelligence and her non-threatening charm won her a place in circles to which someone of her rank would not normally have access. She listened sympathetically as her new friends discussed matters of finance and court intrigue and later she would privately make a suggestion or two that revealed her to be a tactical genius. Many prominent Faeries increased their wealth and stature, or destroyed an enemy, through her counsel and remained grateful thereafter, believing that they alone were the fortunate recipients of her startling wisdom. Because she was a useful friend to have, she was invited to important parties, and exceptions to the usual hierarchies were made to include her. Her friends made her careless promises. She remained gracious, humble, unassuming. Everybody secretly owed her a favour and everybody thought they were the only one. Then, with manoeuvres so subtle that nobody was entirely sure how it had happened, she had taken over the goldmines of Sim and the diamond mines of Harrah, and then all of the silver mines that did not belong to the king, becoming one of the wealthiest and most influential Faeries in the Realm. It was whispered that she had forged allegiances with witches and had access to potions that were strictly forbidden. Besides that, whoever controlled silver was not to be crossed. Her marriage to the High Lord Nikias had confirmed her as a rising star, a fixture in the Faery Court. Though technically she and Nikias should have been allowed only a single son, she was wealthy enough to pay the tax on another. Jalo was born and the odds of a child of hers rising to prominence were increased. Cadeyrn, both in his career and in his marriage to Alvar’s daughter, did her credit. But her younger son, Jalo, had an energy and cleverness to him that made her hope for even greater things. Her ambition for herself and for her sons was boundless. Now it was clear some great intrigue was taking place and that she was excluded from it. As soon as Jalo and his humans had left, she called for her faithful spy, Miyam.

“What have you heard?” she asked.

“Madam, all of the High Lords have gathered at Alvar’s Castella.”

“Does the King know?”

“The spies he thinks to be his have been in Alvar’s pocket for centuries now. He knows nothing.”

Tariro breathed a sigh of relief. This sounded to her like treason and Malferio was nothing if not ruthless when it came to treachery. His marriage to Nia three hundred years ago had led to the most terrible purges the Faery Kingdom had ever known as he struggled to hold on to his power. It was bold indeed of him to have married another outsider last year and to declare her Queen. He was over-confident, and something was happening. Nikias was too slow to ensure his own advantage in whatever changes came. He should have consulted her or at least arranged for a spy to bring her word of the proceedings.

“What are they discussing?”

“I do not know. Nobody but the High Lords themselves have been present at these meetings. But there is more, My Lady.”

“Tell.”

“Alvar has a visitor.”

“Who is it?”

“Nobody knows. She has not showed herself but she is staying in His Majesty’s Wing in the Castella.”

Tariro drew her breath in sharply. Every Castella had a wing for the King, reserved for him alone in case he decided to visit. “You say
she.
How do you know this?”

“One of the guards has seen them together.”

“Is she a Faery?”

“No. Perhaps human.”

“Did this guard say what she looked like?”

“Only that she was very beautiful and she seems to have Alvar’s ear.”

“Forsake the Ancients,” murmured Tariro. “Find a pretext to go to Nikias. I must know everything. And send me the Gem-Weaver.”

~~~

The Faery Mines were legendary throughout Tian Xia. In a Realm of Illusion, they were one of the few realities. The ores and gems within them were the finest in the worlds, both in beauty and in magical properties. As the little group approached the mines, the towering mountains all around them became, in the blink of an eye, rocky hillocks. It did not seem so much a change as a shift in perception, like realizing something you thought was far away is in fact very close, the distant mountain merely a boulder at your feet.

The mine-openings were guarded by Faeries in black silk with glinting spears. Watchful raptors glided overhead. The guards parted for Jalo, however, and so Nell, Charlie and Ander followed him into the dark tunnels beneath the rock. In one of the mines, gold hung luminous as starlight from the ceiling, like tapered stalactites, and in another, diamonds the size of boulders sparkled in the walls and on the damp stone floors.

“Still spooked?” Charlie asked Nell quietly.

“What do you mean?” asked Nell, startled.

“You said you thought this place had a kind of dark undertone to it, before.”

“Oh! Yes. Yes. It does.”

“What did you think I meant?” Charlie sounded hurt.

“I dinnay know. I’m sorry.” She sighed, wondering what to say to make things normal between them again. Part of her wished she could forget what had happened on the lake. It had been such a strange and powerful feeling and she had been unprepared for it. “I’m glad you showed me, Charlie.” She didn’t have to explain what she meant. But she wasn’t telling the whole truth and he knew it.

“It’s nay really a big secret. I just thought...because we’re friends...” he trailed off.

“I know,” she said.

“Come this way!” called Jalo. “Look!”

They followed him down a long glittering tunnel made entirely of diamonds.

“The correct use of diamonds can increase the power of a Curse exponentially,” said Jalo cheerfully, waving his fire stick so the light at the end of it leaped off the glittering walls.

“Your mother seems partial to them,” said Charlie. Jalo gave him a sharp look. Charlie looked back blankly. His hair had fallen over his eyes again.