The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) (48 page)

‘Well met, Michael Riven,’ Isay said, and Riven shut his aching eyes.

‘Yeah, right,’ he replied, and felt himself carried out of the reach of the wind and the searching rain.

F
ACES CAME AND
went. He was aware of a fire, of heat baking him. Someone undressed him and wiped the ice from his face, and then he was laid down in a bed; a real bed. And he was able to leave this dream for a while and go back to the real world.

But he woke again with the light of an afternoon steaming in through narrow windows to bar the coverlet. The room was warm, the fire glowing in the hearth. He was stiff and sore, but he found that his scratches had been bandaged and he could feel his toes, which was an improvement.

He sat up. He was alone in the room, though there was a chair by his bed. Outside, he could hear the wind in the eaves, and voices from elsewhere in the house. He lay back again comfortably, memories of dungeons and sewers and rat-people coming and going in his head like the shards of a nightmare. What a place. What a bloody place!

And then he remembered Isay from the night before. So they were safe. They were here. Thank Christ.

There were clothes on a low table to the right of the bed, and he flung aside his coverings to examine them. More Minginish clothes. He was building up quite a wardrobe—or would be, if he were not destroying them all the time.

The door opened, and Madra stood there, joy lighting her face as she saw him sitting up. He grinned at her, and she ran across the room to fling herself into his arms, tumbling him to his back on the bed. He laughed out loud and kissed her soundly. She had a dressing still bound around her throat. He held her face in his hands and gazed into the grave eyes that were dancing with gladness. The sight of them took ten years off him.

‘Can you talk yet?’

Her face clouded slightly, and she shook her head. He kissed her on the forehead.

‘Are you all right? Did they treat you badly?’

She nodded and shook her head, unable to look away from him. There was incredulity in the eyes now, and her fingers ran through his hair, over his chest, as though to verify that it was really he who was asking her this, who had kissed her so unrestrainedly.

‘What about the others? Ratagan—is he all right? I saw him—’

She nodded again, then kissed him into silence.

‘Ratagan is alive and well, and I see that you are not in such ill health either, my friend,’ the familiar deep voice said from the doorway.

Madra rolled off him and he saw that Ratagan, Bicker, Finnan and the rest of the company were clustered there. Even Luib’s face seemed to hold a flicker of amusement.

‘There’s a time and a place for everything,’ Bicker laughed, and they came in like a gale with Quirinus at their rear, his thick brows halfway up his forehead.

Riven threw his legs off the bed and found himself in a bearlike embrace as the big man crushed him to his chest. His face was a purple swollen mess with a livid scab running from temple to nose, but the blue eyes were as unsullied as ever in the middle of it.

The rest of the company were in a similar condition. Even Finnan had his fair share of bruises, whilst Bicker had a linen bandanna stained vermilion around his skull. The dark man grasped Riven’s shoulder and shook him.

‘Quirinus tells us you have been consorting with wizards and Vyrmen, exploring the hidden passages of Talisker and swimming in the sewers. None of us believes him, of course. For a time, there, you almost had us concerned, Michael Riven.’

Riven grinned. For some reason it seemed remarkably easy to do so.

‘I’m as fit as a fiddle. When do we leave?’

‘Soon, but not too soon,’ Quirinus put in dryly. ‘You and your friends had best rest for a day or two before setting out for the mountains. Bicker will explain.’

‘Indeed,’ the dark man said, his face sobering. ‘We are all suffering the after-effects of the Lady Jinneth’s hospitality, and her Sellswords are combing the foothills for us.’

‘We are, you might say, a trifle sought after,’ Ratagan interjected.

‘We are outlawed,’ Finnan said. He looked glum, probably thinking of his flatboat, still moored inside Talisker’s Rivergate. ‘They took me soon after I left Phrynius’s house. They had been watching it.’

‘What happened?’ Riven asked. ‘How did the Vyrmen free you?’

‘With stealth and skill, and some luck.’ Bicker nodded towards the bald man in the corner who was watching them intently. ‘Quirinus’s men helped once we were out of the cells, but even so we had to dispose of a few mercenaries before we quit the city.’

‘Not such a distasteful task,’ Ratagan said. There was a perilous light in his eye that made him look oddly like Isay.

‘And now my Hearthwares have joined in the hunt for you,’ Quirinus added with heavy irony. ‘It need not be said that Keigar and I have them well-briefed. You should have a clear route up into the higher foothills at least.’

‘Supplies have been readied,’ Bicker said. ‘We can leave within two days, perhaps even in one, depending on how able we feel.’

Riven asked the question that had been occurring to him even in Phrynius’s house.

‘Who goes?’

‘Yourself, Ratagan and I.’ The dark man glanced round the company a trifle uncomfortably. ‘Isay insists on joining us. That is all. Madra, you are not fit for it—’

Riven felt her stiffen.

‘—and Corrary and Luib will stay to try and see you safely home.’

Corrary made a swift movement of protest, instantly stifled by a look from Bicker.

‘I got your brother killed,’ the dark man said softly. ‘One is enough.’ Luib remained impassive.

‘At least that is sorted,’ Quirinus said, the dry tone back in his voice, and he moved out of his place in the corner. ‘And it is almost time to eat. I like my food, and will be happy for whoever of you it pleases to join me.’ He left unobtrusively, followed closely by a thoughtful-looking Finnan.

‘Our waterborne friend is after a new job,’ Ratagan remarked when they had gone.

‘And who can blame him?’ Bicker asked. The gladness had leeched out of him, and he was worn and drawn again. ‘Come. We will eat. Join us if you feel up to it, Michael Riven. Quirinus lays a good board.’ He smiled. ‘Though his steward is not yet up to our Colban. I will see you later.’

And he left also, ushering out Corrary and the two Myrcans. Ratagan lingered a moment longer. He strode over to one of the windows and stared out at the snow-flecked mountains beyond.

‘Almost there,’ he said. He turned around. ‘Mereth is doing well. She is a fine girl. A fine woman, indeed. Quirinus is trying to locate her father—discreetly, of course...’ He trailed off, and bent his great grizzled head to look at his hands. There was grey in his hair, Riven noted with something like a shock. He seemed battered and mortal, and suddenly unsure; a Thor facing Ragnarok. But when he looked up, there was the usual grin on his face. ‘I had best go. I will miss the best of the beer. And I think you two may have a few things to talk around. Be good.’ He exited quietly.

Riven sat back on the bed and Madra’s arm encircled his waist. She laid her cheek on his shoulder. Almost there. And for the first time the thought held no terror for him. He felt that the many strands in this story were finally coming together.

Everything is meant to be.

He hugged Madra closer to him, feeling strangely whole.

A
ND LATER, WHEN
night had come and he was watching the snow pile up in crescents at the windows, and the fire was a red eye in the darkness of the room, she came to him again. She was barefoot, and wore a long cloak that hung to her ankles. As she stood by his bed, with her dark hair like a hood about her face, he was reminded of Jinneth in the dungeon. But she cast the cloak aside with a twitch of her shoulders and stood nude before him, the low glow of the coals bathing her skin in scarlet and shadow. She slipped into the bed with the cold air about her, seeking his warmth. He gave it to her without stint, taking and receiving all she offered. And none of the old ghosts came to crowd at his shoulder. He was a boy again, a youth with questions in his eyes and wonder at the sheer delight of touching her and joining himself to her. Again, he felt that fleeting sense of wholeness, of rightness. He was one with the slowly falling snow outside, the savage splendour of the mountains, the frozen earth and the people who walked it. He was splicing himself into the fabric of a world that had claimed him before his birth, and was happy to do so, for it was fitting. And he felt himself healed.

It was time, at last, to seek the mountains.

SEVENTEEN

T
ALISKER WAS A
hazy hill with the grey blade of the Great River winding around its feet. They stopped in their upward trek to look back at it, at the vast open plain of the Vale shining white in the weak sunlight, the black smudges of villages with their wisps of smoke, the beetle-like clutter of buildings that were Rim-Armishir already distant.

Riven, Bicker, Ratagan, Isay. And then there were four. They were on the last leg of the Quest, climbing slowly but steadily into the foothills of the mountains. The Greshorns. And in their midst the Red Mountain; the Staer. Arat Gor to the Dwarves, and, in another world, Sgurr Dearg.

Three weeks, perhaps, if the weather holds. Not long left. Riven’s legs were stiff and sore, his collar bone aching with the weight of the pack perched high on his shoulders. There was a wind picking up to stir the dry snow and whirl it in clouds about them. It was cold. The snow had stopped falling, and was even now beginning to melt, but there was more of it on the bitter wind and he could see where the distant heights were dusted with it. He peered ahead though the pain in his skull and his sucking lungs to see great ragged masses of stone rearing up to the sky in twisting ridges and peaks, veined with snow, bare as gravestones. The very sight ate away his strength, made him want to turn and stumble back down the steep way they had come, perhaps even to take his place at the side of a frowning woman who could not speak.

But no. He had things to do. Places to see and people to meet. He smiled into the wind.

They stopped their staring and continued on their way wordlessly, with Talisker and its fiefs at their backs and the stony hills in front.

The day went past in a tired upward haul and the quiver of thigh muscles forcing themselves to flex and straighten time after time. They shed clothing as they walked, and sweated and laboured over boulder fields wet with slush, through ankle-deep mountain streams as clear as wet glass.

There were curlews here, and once they startled a brace of grouse that launched themselves from under their feet as they trudged along. Where the snow melted, there was copper-coloured bracken on the sides of the hills and rabbit droppings on grassy slopes. And once they saw an eagle circling with his fingered feathers spread against the grey sky.

Speed, bonny boat...

At the fall of the first night, they camped below a profusion of rock buttresses that leered down at them, naked of vegetation. The ground was hard and chill, and Riven was grimly satisfied. Somehow it seemed more concrete with every step. There were no warriors here, no fortresses or monsters. Only the gaunt emptiness of the hills taking him back to what he had once been. He felt he could trust the cruelty of the granite cliffs and the icefields, the sullen massiveness of the mountains. He was at home here, as he had always been in the high, desolate places of Skye.

More days went by, and the silence of the mountains became infectious. Even Ratagan was quiet and subdued, whereas Bicker wore a constant frown under his bandaged skull. All of them found the going hard, their recent sufferings having taken a toll of stamina and fitness. But they had not objected when Riven announced on their second morning in Quirinus’s home that they must leave at once. They seemed to recognise that there was something in him that was calling for urgency. It was almost as though they had an appointment to keep.

Their way began to take them through the peaks proper and they found themselves treading the narrow ways at the foot of massive acned scree slopes with snow peppering the stones. The wind was cut off, and there was only the rattle of the rock and the far shriek of the eagles as they circled tirelessly in another world far above.