Sorcery Rising Read online

  He reached down and hauled the nomad to his feet. The old man felt as insubstantial as a bird: all skin and clusters of thin bones that felt as though they might snap like twigs under his hand. Guaya ran around the other side of her grandfather, wedging her shoulder under his armpit, and together they began to drag him away.

  They would have succeeded, had a small man in boiled leather armour not cannoned into them as he tried to flee a tall young Istrian in a bright pink tunic, who was coming after him with his silver knife outstretched. The small man caught Saro by the arm, swinging him round, so that the moodstone-seller was wrenched from his grip and flung forward. There was the sodden, crunching sound of an impact, followed by a terrible wheezing cry, and by the time Saro had recovered himself, he found Guaya, her face distorted by grief and loathing, laying about his brother, Tanto, with her fists, and the old man lying on the ground with the silver knife buried to the hilt in his chest. Tanto was holding the child away from him, his fingers splayed wide across her forehead, a look of pure disgust on his face; then he pushed her savagely, turned, placed his foot on the old man’s chest, retrieved his knife, and walked away. Saro, rooted to the spot, stared after him in disbelief.

  The small man Tanto had been chasing vanished into the crowd.

  With a terrible wail, Guaya fell, sobbing, across her grandfather’s prone body. The old man moved a hand slowly to her face and cupped her cheek. His eyes were dull. Saro knelt beside them, shocked into uselessness. Where Tanto had withdrawn the dagger, bright-red blood pumped inexorably out of the wet hole, staining the nomad’s white robe. Saro watched it with something approaching fascination, then slowly, instinctively, he pushed his hand against the gaping wound, trying to stem the flow. It pushed up between his fingers, fountains of it, thick and unstoppable. So much blood. He could not imagine any body held so much blood, let alone the body of such a frail, elderly man. He could feel the quick, thin pulse of the heart beneath the heel of his hand, fluttering away like a tiny bird in a cage. He pressed down again, harder. As he did so, the old man turned his head. His dark eyes bored into Saro’s and the nausea rose in him again; different this time, more like dizziness or vertigo, and then the nomad placed his hand over the one Saro held upon his chest and whispered something in a language Saro could not understand, a language punctuated with little pressures of air that in a stronger man might have come out as whistling sounds: and then he died. Saro could tell the exact moment the nomad’s spirit passed from him; not just by the way his eyes went unfocused and his mouth fell open, as if in some expression of regret; but when the moodstone on his forehead gave up all its colour, falling away through the sheerest of pastel shades to an eventual bleak and unmarked grey.

  Saro felt his mind become a cool, clear pool of calm: a glacier lake; a mountain tarn, untroubled by the movements of men, its surface unbroken by the slightest ripple. All around, there was a moment of the utmost quietude; and then came a hubbub of sound. Out of the distant crowd rose the high-pitched wail of a grieving woman; the shouts of men, angry or horrified; the weeping of a child.

  Saro lifted his head. Tanto was standing some distance away, his eyes blank and unresponsive. Beside him was Lord Tycho Issian, his hand on Tanto’s shoulder: an approving hand, it seemed to Saro then, in that moment of clarity, rather than a restraining one. An old woman came running towards him, arms outstretched, tears streaking the paint on her face. She fell on her knees beside the dead man and began to cover his face with kisses. Suddenly embarrassed to be witness to such pain and intimacy, Saro stood up, and the blood ran off him in streams. His hands dripped with it.

  He turned and started to walk away: away from the scene of death, away from his brother and the curious onlookers; but suddenly there was a hand upon his arm. As it gripped him, he was engulfed by a hot wash of sorrow; sorrow, and despair: someone had killed her grandfather, needlessly, wantonly, and then had walked away; he had died in front of her, all the light going out of his eyes. Fear, such fear: for now Grandmother would break her heart, and who would look after them both now, now that Grandfather was gone, dead and gone?

  He blinked, shook his head. The hand fell away, and with it went the chaos of emotion, leaving him feeling like a fish cast up on a stormtide, weak and struggling for air in an unfamiliar element. He looked down. Guaya, the child, stood there before him, her eyes huge and brimming. She held her hand out. In it sat the moodstone pendant that Saro had chosen for his mother. In the child’s palm the stone had taken on the blue of a winter sky, streaked with pale strands of purple, like the premonition of a sunset, and he knew at once that it marked both her grief and her fear; knew not from the stone, but from something inside himself, something new and unasked for; something that had entered him like an uninvited visitor.

  ‘He said he wanted to give you a gift,’ she said quietly. ‘I think he meant this.’

  Saro shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not the necklace, that wasn’t what he meant.’ He smiled, and felt the tears come.

  The child stared at him uncomprehending, then pushed the pendant into his hand nevertheless, and ran away.

  Seven

  Rose of the World

  From the safety of his caravan in the nomad quarter, Virelai watched the fracas with interest and not a little fear. He saw the moodstone stall go over with a crash, and the old man disappear from view beneath a trample of angry feet. He saw how a small, fat mercenary – trying to escape the fury of a young Istrian almost twice his height, dressed in a vile pink tunic that had no doubt afforded the mercenary ample ammunition for the insult that had engaged the southerner’s ire – had cannoned into old Hiron, spinning him around to meet the thrust of his pursuer’s knife. All this had been extraordinary enough to someone raised in the swaddling confines of Sanctuary, where his entire experience of violence had been restricted to an occasional cuff around the ear. But witnessing the casual brutality with which the Istrian had then retrieved his dirtied weapon – setting his foot on the dead man’s chest for leverage – he had felt both deeply agitated and yet at the same time perversely excited. The action had spoken of something deeper and darker than mere ferocity. It was at once fascinating and repellent. It spoke of insouciance at the value of a life; a fixation with self to the exclusion of all else; a rampant, intemperate egotism. Virelai had not believed men capable of such aberrant behaviour; he found himself unable to take his eyes off the man.

  He watched as the killer strolled through the parted crowd to stand beside a noble dressed in plain, dark silks. With a start, Virelai realised he recognised the man as the one who had that very afternoon come to his stand offering money, marriage – almost his soul – for the woman (if such she could be termed) who even now lay quietly on the bunk behind him. A man who had gone away empty-handed, with murder in his eyes. What peculiar extremities of emotion these men possessed, he thought: and each reaction so inappropriate to the circumstances that had provoked them. They seemed an entirely different genus of humanity to the nomads – diverse though they were – with whom he had travelled these past months. The Footloose – as the foreigners called them – were placid people, gentle with one another: gentle even with the lowest of their animals. In all these months he had seen no nomad raise either voice or hand to another. These others seemed in contrast turbulent: unstable, as vicious as the wild dogs which had set upon the yeka calf they had lost in the Plains, tearing it limb from limb as if to do the greatest violence to the poor beast’s flesh was a kind of reward in itself.

  And where the nomads lived cheerfully moment to moment and hand to mouth, these others schemed and planned and dreamed of the wealth and the power they could amass, the way they could control others, manipulate and exploit them and the world they shared. Virelai had watched and learned. Their greed and their gullibility had taken him by surprise, as had his own ingenuity. If the Master had taught him anything, it was how to use his mind; and he had been putting that ability to ferocious use. Using a parody of Rahe’s to
ne of cryptic authority in combination with the glittering lumps of ore he had – on a whim? By premonition? – taken from Sanctuary and the maps he had so painstakingly copied from the collection he had brought from the library, he had already gulled half a dozen treasure-hunters and glory-seekers to undertake the hazardous voyage north. Surely one of them might make it safely through the floes and storms to the fastness and there strike down the old man forever? The terms of the geas Rahe had laid on his head and repeated each year on what he referred to, with a mocking smile, as Virelai’s ‘life-day’, prevented him from killing the Master himself, augmented as it was by the vile images the mage sent into his mind of tortures by faceless demons, howling wastes, endless agonies . . . Sending the old man into a long, long sleep, however, until someone else could complete the task seemed to circumnavigate the prohibitions of the curse nicely.

  But what to do with the Rosa Eldi? There was profit to be had there; profit and power, if he could only think clearly . . .

  As if his thoughts had brushed her mind, the figure behind him began to stir.

  ‘What is it, Lai?’ The woman rose up in a single supple motion, to peer over his shoulder out of the door. The cat, unseen somewhere in the darkness of the wagon, began to purr. ‘What have you seen?’

  Fronds of her white-blonde hair brushed his cheek, causing him to shiver. He could not help himself. The shiver went through skin and muscle, fibre and bone and proceeded to root itself firmly in his groin.

  Time for another draught of the brome, he thought grimly, to keep her diabolical attraction at bay. He had found the oat-grass extract was the only remedy for the appalling burning he otherwise had to endure in her presence. It was lucky that the further he had gone from Sanctuary, the better his potions worked, as if the Master’s grip upon him waned with every mile travelled. A pity that the Rosa Eldi’s power had not followed the same pattern. The boat-trip had been the worst, for then he had no brome with which to dose himself. It was his own fault, he rebuked himself, for taking her away in the first place, and then for opening the damned box, rather than simply dropping it over the side, or trading it to the first merchant he happened upon when he came into port. In the end, he’d lifted the lid during a particularly bored period at sea: with magic fanning the sails and the yowling of the cat finally quietened by a twist of cloth about its muzzle, he had had nothing else to occupy him than to fantasise about the creature he had stolen.

  One sight of those extraordinary eyes as they fixed themselves upon him, and he had been lost to her, overcome by unstoppable lust. The problem was, even if she had been willing – and oddly enough she had shown him no antipathy – his own body did not seem to be equipped to carry out the act he craved. This had been a strange discovery for him after such a long, isolated and innocent existence. For while the sight and the presence of her made his entire body flame with need, a fire that focused itself most precisely in his groin, the flesh there refused in the Rosa Eldi’s presence to rise to his need, remaining pale and flaccid ever since he had first touched her in the Master’s chamber. It was, he thought, a mystery: damnably odd, and damnably unfair. Even more unfairly, the cat had proved to be in this particular instance quite useless. Extraordinary, really, considering the quantity of magic it contained. If it had not been for the oat-grass, and the nomad healer who had sympathetically suggested it, he would surely have gone out of his mind.

  ‘Nothing to see now,’ he said, extricating himself with care to avoid further dangerous contact. ‘There was a fight and someone was killed.’

  The sea-green eyes went wide. Virelai looked quickly away.

  ‘Killed?’ She frowned. ‘Made dead?’

  Her understanding of such concepts was still remarkably limited, despite all his efforts to educate her; and even her ability to speak and understand the Old Tongue had been patchy, as if the Master had decided it not to be a valuable trait in one whom he used as he did.

  ‘Yes, made dead,’ he returned flatly.

  ‘Who was it?’ She was avid now: he could tell from the tone of her voice. It was odd, he reflected, that she had somehow learned the ability to intonate, while her teacher’s utterances remained defiantly inflectionless, no matter how he tried to remedy the matter.

  ‘It was Hiron Sea-Haar, the moodstone-seller.’

  ‘How came he by his death?’

  ‘He was stabbed through the heart by a young Istrian; or rather, he ran onto the knife.’

  She considered this for a moment.

  ‘Cannot you do something for him?’ she said at last.

  Virelai turned and regarded her curiously, mentally prepared for the jolt such a glance would afford him. ‘I am not the Master,’ he said softly. ‘In case you had forgotten.’

  She smiled then, and the upturned lips dimpled her cheeks sweetly. ‘I had not forgotten that,’ she said. ‘How should I?’ She picked up the cat and cradled it against her. Two pairs of lambent green eyes regarded him dispassionately.

  ‘Look at the pair of you! Blood and tatters and stinking to high haven of araque and piss. You’re a disgrace, to yourselves, and to the Rockfall clan.’

  Aran Aranson strode up and down the booth, his face thunderous, his brows making a single black line across his forehead.

  ‘Tor: as the elder and as my fosterson I expect you to have learned better than to behave thus while under my care; and as for you, Fent, I am pained to find yet again that I cannot trust you further than I can see you. I had thought after last year’s Allfair you might have learned your lesson; but, no. Quite apart from your behaviour in the nomad quarter, you left your brother in charge of the sardonyx for the entire afternoon; and for that you shall forfeit your share in today’s takings, small as they are.’

  Fent, chastened, hung his head, which just made it throb all the worse, for the drink, and for the blow he had taken in the midst of the brawl, which had left a swelling the size of a puffin’s egg on his temple. Tor, however, continued to stare at a point just over his fosterfather’s left shoulder. His eyes gleamed. Katla had the sense that he was relishing this scene as much as he had the drink and the fighting.

  ‘You do not seem to realise that conflict with the Istrians is the last thing Eyra can afford right now. Our resources are low: we are still recovering from our last bloody war, and our king is young and untried and surrounded by adventurers and politicians. And you charge in and start a fight with a group of wealthy Istrian youths. If we don’t have blood-price to pay, we’ll be lucky—’

  ‘We didn’t start the fight,’ Tor said flatly, moving his stony eyes from the back of the tent to his fosterfather’s furious face. ‘It was already in progress.’ He smiled, remembering with sudden pleasure the grunt of pain he had won from the Istrian boy in pink. ‘We just waded in to help our friends.’

  Fent, knowing this to be a downright lie, stared harder at the ground between his feet.

  Aran held Tor’s gaze for a few grim seconds. The air was full of menace. Katla found herself holding her breath: so when the voices came outside the tent, she was almost relieved.

  Almost.

  The doorflap opened to reveal a pair of Allfair guards, swords unsheathed. They wore the blue cloaks that marked them as law-keepers, but both were Istrian in appearance, with clean-shaven chins and dark eyes. All the guards at the Fair this year were Empire-born. In this, his first year at the Allfair as King, Ravn had failed to provide an Eyran contingent. There had been some muttering amongst the northern traders at such a lack, but to Katla’s mind officials were officials, whatever their provenance.

  ‘We are looking for three perpetrators,’ the first guard intoned in heavily-accented Old Tongue, stepping into the tent. ‘Two are believed to be Eyran. There was a fight in the nomad quarter and a young Istrian has been badly wounded. We are looking for the man who did it.’

  ‘He had red hair,’ the second added smoothly, staring over his colleague’s shoulder straight at Katla, who sat closest to the door.

  Fen
t, in the shadows, made a move to step forward, but Tor held his arm.

  Katla stood up. ‘Do I look as if I’ve been in a brawl?’ she asked sarcastically. Bundles of coloured ribbons and pretty beads showered down from her lap. ‘I’ve been buying trinkets for the Gathering.’

  The second official coloured, but the first, unperturbed, declared with a thin smile: ‘The second perpetrator we seek is a young Eyran who committed a sacrilege upon Falla’s Rock.’

  Katla felt her heart thump with sudden force. ‘A sacrilege?’ she repeated stupidly.

  ‘A crime punishable by burning.’

  Tor strode out of the shadows. ‘Don’t intimidate this young woman any further,’ he said forcibly, stepping between the Istrians and Katla. ‘She is not the one you seek, I am.’

  The second guard looked him up and down. ‘Your hair is yellow,’ he said sharply. ‘So you do not fit the description of he who wounded Diaz Sestran. And witnesses say the one who climbed the Rock was a woman.’

  Tor made a gross curtsey. ‘At your service.’

  The officials exchanged glances.

  ‘You waste our time with such mockery,’ the first one said angrily, staring past Tor into the booth. ‘It is not appreciated.’

  Aran picked up a stoneware flask and came into the light. ‘I regret young Tor’s irreverence,’ he said solemnly, extending the flask. ‘As you can see, he fits neither description. Please take this flask of stallion’s blood in recognition of your wasted time and as a token of fellowship at this Fair.’

  The first man took it and sniffed suspiciously, and his head recoiled. He passed the flask to his companion. ‘What is this?’ he demanded. ‘Horse piss?’

  Tor guffawed.