Hella sighed unconsciously and Ember remembered the pleasure she had taken in ordering the masks.
‘That was another time,’ Fridja said heavily. ‘Once festival nights on Iridom were a delight that drew revellers from every sept, but these days they are used as cover for violent plots and counterplots, and half the population is maddened or drunk from all of the experimental potions that the olfactors give away at this time.’
‘Iridom has been given to misrule since Coralyn took control,’ Duran said.
‘The old chieftain would be writhing in his earthbed if he could see what his folly has done to his beloved sept,’ Fridja said wrathfully. ‘If he had not been such a fool, he would have set aside the fevered lust of his senses out of respect for his age and his responsibility to his sept.’
‘How was Orrim to know what Coralyn would become?’ Duran asked. ‘His woman had died, leaving him with a wailing babe and a cold bed. Why not life bond with a beautiful and sensual young Iridomi noble woman?’
‘He must have known what she was like, given the disastrous business with Ranouf!’ Virat argued.
‘No doubt the old chieftain told himself that a grown man who makes a fool of himself over a child deserves what he gets. It is easy to see Coralyn as a monster, but remember that she was little more than a child herself when she encountered Ranouf. By the time she seduced the old chieftain, she had gone through two perfectly ordinary marriages and had become a grown woman. Mature and beautiful. And what chieftain would not see the advantage of having the mother of a chosen mermod for his mate?’ Duran added, taking up a mirror and peering at her face.
‘Maybe I can imagine a man bonding a beautiful woman,’ Fridja conceded. ‘But by the time he was dying, Orrim had to have known what Coralyn was, so why did he make her his heir? Why not name her regent until Unys was old enough?’
‘Maybe he did not know what she was,’ Duran said, pulling her boots on. ‘Remember, Coralyn was playing for high stakes – the chieftain’s throne. Surely that was worth a few seasons of good pretence?’
Fridja made a growling sound in the back of her throat. ‘I think he knew exactly what she was by then. The statement Orrim supposedly made, naming Coralyn the next chieftain of Iridom, was voiced by Kalide because his foster father was supposedly too weak to make himself heard. Those present say the strain of the occasion set off a severe attack that killed him. I say the attack came because of Orrim’s attempts to denounce Kalide for voicing words that were not his. And how convenient that the old chieftain died before white cloaks could be summoned.’
‘There were witnesses. The whole court was present. Some of them heard Orrim’s words,’ Bleyd said.
‘So they claimed, but look at those who would have been there,’ Fridja said forcefully. ‘Iridomi nobles and wealthy olfactors that Coralyn had cultivated. It was she who formed the centre of the Iridomi court in those latter days of Orrim’s chieftainship. By then she would have weeded out all of those who displeased her and everyone present would know where their best interests lay. Anyone who baulked would have been dealt with, one way or another.’
‘Telo,’ Duran said, beckoning to a plump woman with scruffy clothing and rat-tailed hair who had just entered.
‘The bags are in the guest chambers,’ Telo said triumphantly.
‘I hope getting them was not difficult because I am afraid that you will have to make another trip,’ Duran said and she explained about the hidden chits. Hella was made to describe where they were and then Duran drew the myrmidon aside and they spoke for some time before Telo departed again. Then she spoke with Fridja, who also departed.
‘Did she say anything about the watcher?’ Bleyd asked impatiently.
‘That was what we were speaking about. The reason she took so long is because she was trying to get a good look at him. She could not identify him, but what she saw is enough for me to tell you that the man who followed you is not an accomplice of the carriage driver.’
‘How can you be sure of that?’ Bleyd asked.
‘Because I recognised him from her description. I have asked Fridja to have him brought here so that we can find out what he is up to.’
‘But you said Telo hardly saw him,’ Hella said curiously.
‘The man she saw was deformed in a particular and rare manner. I …’ she broke off, her eyes going to the door. ‘Gorick, what is it?’
The big scarred myrmidon who had just come in was panting hard as she said urgently, ‘I was almost at the manifest house when I overheard that the Olfactors Parade route has been changed. Apparently it will pass between this place and the night garden.’
Duran rose, cursing. ‘Then I must go at once, or I will not be able to reach the night garden in time for my meeting with Bukanic. You had better come with me, Gorick. You can go to the manifest house tomorrow morning.’
Duran pulled on her headdress and cloak and swept out, Gorick following at her heels like a great silent hound.
Ember stripped off her crumpled and sweat-stained green gown with relief, then sluiced her sticky body down as best she could using the bowl of water and the cloth that had been placed on a low table in the guest chamber. It was a long way from the luxurious swim of the afternoon, nevertheless she was considerably refreshed. Bleyd and even Hella had looked disappointed when she had announced her wish to retire; no doubt they had wanted to talk about the events of the day. But for Ember that would necessitate more lies and circumlocutions of the truth, unless she announced outright that she was a stranger, which she could not bring herself to do until she had spoken to Duran.
Having finished her wash, she lay on the bed and closed her eyes. A stream of images from the long day floated through her mind: Revel’s tight, sullen expression as they left the ship, the sight of the crowded pier, the walk to the nightshelter and then the long hot drive through the jungle to the incredible fire falls. She was struck again by the way in which even the memory of the fire falls soothed her. It was an irony to think that beauty might have such a power, given how much of her life she had spent despising anyone who admired physical beauty. On the other hand, maybe that was only because what was perceived as human beauty was all too often only conformity to a physical ideal, more often than not conjured up as a marketing strategy. But the fire falls, as with much beauty occurring in nature, were beautiful precisely because they were a magnificent aberration: fire was not meant to burn water.
Ember suddenly realised that for her to judge something beautiful, it must offer a kind of ambiguity that pulled at your senses as much as it repelled them. By those standards, she was not beautiful, unlike the manbeast Ronaall, who, like the falls, was an aberration of nature.
Deformed …
Ember frowned remembering that Duran had used the word to describe the man who followed them from the ship. If Duran was right and the man was not connected to the ruffian gangs, she could not imagine why he had followed them. Duran seemed to have no idea either, despite knowing who he was, but at the same time she clearly felt there was no danger to them. No doubt he was now wondering what on earth had become of them. Unless Telo had openly collected their bags and paid the nightshelter out. And what would he make of that?
Ember drifted into a dream in which she was hurrying home to get her pills, which she had forgotten. All of a sudden she saw her own house, which was the house she had lived in as a child, but it was set oddly amidst a lot of skyscrapers. Before she could reach the gate, the black road surface began to melt and liquify under her feet. Now there were buildings on all sides with light pouring from the windows, and be-feathered myrmidons peered out, shrieking and jibbering at her like a flock of mad birds. All around her, the buildings with their shrieking inhabitants began to sink into the blackness. She clung to the fence to keep from sinking.
All at once Ember heard a thread of a song and the Unykorn of the tapestries burst from the black waves lapping at the half-submerged buildings and hovered above her. The creature’s dark, lovely eyes
held hers and there was an expression of such profound gentleness and radiance on its face that Ember wept.
‘I can help you.’ The Unykorn’s voice in the dream sounded inside her mind as Ronaall’s had done. But where Ronaall’s voice had been rough and urgent, the Unykorn’s was like a song. When Ember did not answer, it dipped its velveted muzzle and began to descend. As its hoofs touched the blackness, it did not sink, but the blackness began to taint it, rising through its hoofs to its slender legs.
‘No!’ she screamed, and woke.
As the terror of the nightmare faded, it occurred to Ember that, whether or not it was real, the Unykorn was at the other end of the spectrum from all the dark beauty and sorrowing mystery of the manbeast. He was despair and grief and the Unykorn was hope; brightness; radiance; and in the dream she had just had, self-sacrifice. Yet like the manbeast, the Unykorn, too, was wild in the deepest sense of the word.
Ember was drowsing back to sleep when she became aware of an ominous heaviness in her head. She could almost feel a thick pain dripping into her skull and pooling at the top of her spine. Soon it would begin to trickle down. She had experienced the sensation before and there was no doubt about what it meant; no more pretence that she was imagining things. When the pain began to trickle down, she would experience it as pain. First there would be a few searing dribbles, then at length a flood that would wash away wit and hope and sanity. Perhaps that had been what her subconscious was trying to tell her with the dream; that pain was coming. Pain enough to drown the world.
The thought was sufficiently bleak to have brought dark Ember flowing up from the depths of her mind, but instead, Ember thought of Signe, and held the woman’s name in her mind as a talisman against despair. She must tell Duran the truth about herself as soon as possible, then Duran would put her on a ship and send her at once to Myrmidor. She would see that no time could be lost. She ought to have spoken up tonight, but there simply had been no time unless she had wanted to tell her tale to everyone, and she could not bear to do that.
Too agitated to lie still now, Ember got up and pulled the simplest of her new gowns from her bag and dressed quickly. Pulling the grey cloak around her shoulders she threw a thick veil over her head, more for warmth than concealment, having made up her mind that she would sit in the common room and wait for the myrmidons to return. Duran had said that they would arrive soon after dawn, if all went according to plan. She did not mind the thought of sitting alone.
But as she was approaching the room where the myrmidons had met, Ember heard voices. Her steps slowed, for at least one voice was raised in anger or agitation. Coming to the door she saw Bleyd. He must have been to bed at some point, for he was wearing a nightgown, but he was now talking to Gorick, who was still in her rough trews and tunic. Virat and two other myrmidons, still white-faced and dressed in their acrobatic costumes, stood by as well.
‘What do you mean that Duran vanished?’ Bleyd demanded.
‘I mean that she did not leave the night garden and yet she did not join the others as planned,’ Gorick said.
‘She must have concealed herself somewhere,’ Virat said.
‘We searched. And why would she hide from us?’ one of the acrobats asked, but she sounded baffled.
There was the sound of more steps and Fridja appeared wearing the same filthy clothes she had worn that night. ‘What has happened?’
‘It’s Duran,’ Virat said. ‘She vanished before the meeting with Bukanic.’
‘Before?!’
‘Duran and I arrived at the night garden as planned,’ Gorick said. ‘The others had already gone inside of course. She went in, and I waited as we had arranged. At dawn, the others came out but Duran was not with them. They told me that she never arrived. They went back to search, pretending to have lost some sort of valuable token given them for luck by Maeve, the wife of Chieftain Poverin, who is their patron.’
‘Is it possible that Duran and Bukanic met as soon as she entered and went to a private chamber to conduct their business?’ Fridja asked. ‘He might have approached any tall strong-looking woman until he hit upon her. Then he could have gone into the garden after that.’
‘Some sort of trickery has been worked upon us, and Bukanic is most likely to be at the heart of it,’ Gorick said.
‘All I know is that he left looking furious,’ the other myrmidon acrobat objected. ‘He went off in a carriage, so we could not follow him.’
‘There is another possibility but it would be an evil coincidence if Duran was caught up in a prank,’ Fridja said slowly.
‘A prank?’ Gorick echoed.
‘Disappearances are a specialty of the masked days. If that is all it was, Duran will be released at dusk tonight.’
‘We can not wait that long!’ Virat raged.
‘Duran said that the stones were the priority and must be taken from Iridom whether or not she was captured, except that there are no stones and so her orders are forfeit,’ Gorick said. There was an authority in her voice that silenced the others. ‘If Duran does not appear by this evening, I will torture the true name and address of Bukanic from the hostess, and then I will deal with him.’
‘Do not speak so easily of torture,’ Bleyd said with soft gravity. ‘I do not think you would have the stomach for it, my friend.’
‘Besides which she may not know his true name,’ Fridja said. ‘We will set a constant watch upon the night garden, just in case Duran is still inside. I assume you have left someone there?’
‘All but these two of the acrobats are arrayed about the walls of the garden,’ Gorick said.
‘That will not do,’ Fridja said. ‘There is only one gate. Go back now and recall all of them but two. Those two must keep watch. Take a change of clothes and new masks for them. The acrobatic troupe must not be connected to this matter. The rest of you should rest so that we have a fighting force if there is a need for it. I will set my people to relieve the watchers in a few hours, and in the meantime I will have my urchins sniff out what they can about this Bukanic,’ she added.
‘I will go back and remain on watch,’ Gorick announced, striding out of the room. The two acrobats went inside to change but Bleyd caught at Fridja’s arm.
‘If Duran does not appear by mid-morning, I say we enter the night garden and see what we can learn.’
‘There are not enough of us to invade the garden …’ Fridja protested.
Bleyd cut her off gently. ‘I did not say we should invade, my friend. Only that we should enter the garden and seek to learn Duran’s whereabouts.’
‘You interfere in matters that are not your province, Bleyd,’ Fridja said coolly. ‘Night gardens do not open their door to customers before Kalinda sets.’
‘I have been here often enough to know how things work, Fridja. I am not proposing to go as a customer, but as an entertainers’ agent. Hostesses generally meet with such folk in the mornings. I will send a chit to whet her appetite and …’
‘The hostess of such a prestigious night garden would be highly unlikely to accept any meeting before a long and polite exchange of chits.’
‘Unless what I offered was rare and interesting and for only this one night. Tonight.’ Bleyd asked.
‘It would have to be something extraordinary for her to contemplate cancelling another performer without notice, and she would expect to see your performer at work,’ Fridja said. ‘No matter how you disguise them, the myrmidon acrobats would …’
‘… would not be what I was offering,’ Bleyd concluded.
‘Then what?’ Fridja demanded.
Bleyd took a deep breath and said: ‘I would offer a songmaker who is on her way to become a soulweaver. The visionweaver Ember is, a songmaker of rare ability and, as you know, she carries the very a’luwtha Alene once played, gifted her by the soulweaver. By chance, she even has the perfect clothes to pass.’
‘But will she do it?’ Fridja asked after a long thoughtful pause.
segue …
The w
atcher sat within the secret room that it had constructed in the Void. The eye, it called the chamber, but in truth it was a blinded eye for nothing could be seen from it.
In a sense, the room was a construction much like the memory garden which the blonde girl, Glynn, had created within her mind with the feinna. As was its own body. It, too, had experienced the help of a feinna. It had been the discovery of the existence of the feinna and their strange abilities that had made Lanalor bring them to Keltor. He had thought it no more than an impulse, yet given how the feinna had become entangled with the girl Glynn, the watcher could no longer believe that it was chance alone that had moved him.
It ought by now to have sought the blonde girl out but, discovering that she had another, perhaps greater, protector in her old martial-arts instructor had been a shock. No less a shock than the discovery that he knew so much of the watcher’s plans and history. It desired very much to understand how this could be.
The watcher had seen the man in life, of course, as it had segued about the Unraveller’s world and in the Void seeking to see how those in contact even peripherally with the Unraveller might affect the course of things to come. Lunacy, for of course hundreds of things had happened that it had not foreseen. And the possibilities that might come to pass in any given circumstance were truly limitless, becoming finite only when the moment chose its course. That was why it was truly impossible to faithfully predict the future; the possibilities of what might happen went on growing and growing from moment to moment within the Void. One could make guesses that had a high probability of coming to pass, if one were wise and far-sighted.
But never once had he seen anything to suggest what he – well, it would give the man the name he had borne in life, Wind – would become. The watcher did not know how he had retained his self, despite having given himself to the Void. But he had been a mystic, and such individuals had strange powers.
It ought to have been pleased that someone understood that it had not withheld Lanalor’s flesh out of fear, but it was too alarmed at the knowledge that the man knew its true reasons. Did he also know that it was the Chaos spirit who had slyly offered to allow Lanalor to retain a tiny part of his spirit in order to keep that flesh alive, or that it was Lanalor who had manipulated exactly this offer, even while knowing why the Chaos spirit had made it? Did the man know that Lanalor’s bargain required that, if the Unraveller failed, the flesh of Lanalor would be brought to the Void so that this tiny portion of spirit would rejoin the rest, so that all would be forfeit? And most of all, did he realise that Lanalor had laid his bait, so that there would be enough left of Lanalor to weave the entity called Ronaall, so that Ronaall could aid the Unraveller, even as Lanalor had known that the Chaos spirit would seek to destroy her? Certainly he knew that Ronaall had been Lanalor. But did he know how Lanalor’s body was kept alive with only a whisper of that portion of soul that had been left to it, once Ronaall was formed? Did he know how it had endured over the ages?