‘The chieftain humourss you in order to gain the ssupport of the cult for her war againsst the hagss. You musst go yoursself to Iridom. Take the trakkerbeasst with you.’
‘Master, she … she has escaped.’
‘She musst be recaptured.’
‘It will be as you have commanded,’ the Draaka swore, ashen faced. There was a chilling rustle of laughter, and Aluade’s body bucked and convulsed as if she were in the throes of an epileptic fit, her eyes bulging from their sockets.
The Draaka seemed blind to this. She leaned forward and said avidly, ‘And when it is done, I will drink the Unraveller’s blood and it will bring me great power as you promised?’
‘Fail me and I promisse that I will hear your sscreamss …’ the Chaos spirit answered.
‘Master, I swear to you …’
‘Behold my power …’ Suddenly the room was alive with crackling blue sparks of electricity that flowed over the blank-faced crowd. Glynn suppressed a scream at the raking, burning sensation that crawled over her when the blue passed, but inside she was trembling with relief that somehow the Chaos spirit was blind to her presence among its mesmerised devotees.
Then the draakira, stationed about the room atop the staircases from the various entrances, began to shudder and twitch.
‘The demon houndss …’ the words spewed from Aluade.
The Draaka gaped at the senior draakira who had now fallen to their hands and knees about her, groaning and snarling. Then she stared, fascinated, as, nearby, the fastidious Mingus lifted his face and howled like a wolf. Glynn saw, with an inward shudder, that his eyes were bright red.
Only the Prime was unaffected. But suddenly she began to scream in clear, dreadful agony, writhing and slapping at herself as if she were trying to extinguish invisible flames.
‘Ssso. Betrayer …’ the Chaos spirit spat.
‘Impossible …’ the Draaka looked stunned. ‘You would have seen it, Master.’
‘The woman hid her true sself from me under hypnossiss. When I touched her mind, I ssaw a loyal zealot. But to transsform her into a hound, I went deeper and only then did I ssee the truth. Sshe had only one directive. To protect the Unraveller if it sshould happen that Lanalor’ss chossen should fall into our handss. Bitch!’
Aluade dragged the writhing Prime to the altar and hauled her upright with maniacal strength. ‘Before you die, look upon the sacrifice and despair, for iss he not your true and ssecret masster?’ the Chaos spirit hissed. Aluade dragged the hood away.
Glynn felt as if her heart were trying to claw its way out of her chest, because the man on the altar was Solen!
This was why she had come into such perilous circumstances. But had she any plan, for without a plan or allies, she could do no more than watch Solen die, or die trying uselessly to free him against impossible odds.
The Draaka’s face was suffused with rage and, without warning, she sprang at the Prime and stabbed her to the heart. ‘Let there be two sacrifices this night, My Lord Chaos,’ she hissed, turning to Solen who lay struggling against his bindings.
‘Foul bitch! She did not deserve such a death,’ he grated.
Glynn had now crept forward to the front rank of the crowd, and she felt for a knife in her belt. Madness, Glynn thought, trapped inside her.
‘Kill him now,’ the Chaos spirit hissed from Aluade’s mouth. ‘Then will I channel my power into the chossen and complete the processs that will make them my houndss.’
‘Die,’ the Draaka snarled.
Glynn threw herself forward, but instead of hitting the altar, she fell forward onto her knees with painful force. Dazed, she shook her head, wondering how she had missed the altar, then she realised that she was no longer in the haven. Instead, she was kneeling on the stone floor of a small, round sitting room. A manbeast sat in a chair, staring down at her gravely. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she gasped.
‘Yes, though you should not remember it,’ the manbeast said in his deep rasping voice. But instead of helping her up, he knelt to look into her face. Glynn saw that his eyes were the colour and intensity of molten gold. ‘I should not have interfered but your reactions were too strong. In a few moments the Chaos spirit would have had you.’
‘The Draaka will sacrifice Solen …’ Glynn cried.
‘No,’ the manbeast said. ‘Or at least it is highly unlikely. What you saw was only one of the many ways that he might die and, while he lives, each moment spawns a new death …’
Glynn shook her head, the horror of what she had witnessed too strong to be shrugged off easily. ‘I must warn him and the Prime.’
The manbeast rose and shook his head. His long dark hair rippled with the movement. ‘Before you act, remember that, in warning them, you may bring about the very things you witnessed. Especially for the Prime whose ignorance is all that keeps her safe.’
‘I cant just do nothing. She saved my life in the haven on Acantha. If this vision told the truth, she …’
‘… has a task which she volunteered to fulfil, though it might cost her life.’ His strange eyes were distracted as if his mind had gone off on a tangent.
‘Who … what are you? What is any of this to do with you?’ Glynn asked.
‘Once I was a betrayer, just as you will be. But now, let us say that I am one of the forces that opposes the Chaos spirit in secret.’
Glynn recoiled. ‘I won’t betray the Unraveller. Anyway, I can’t because I don’t know who he is.’
The manbeast shook his head again and said something but Glynn was falling inexorably away from him.
She opened her eyes and found herself flat on her back and looking up into the face of the Holder of Keltor.
‘Did you see her?’ Tarsin demanded when Glynn had managed to regain her feet. His odour was as sharply ammoniac up close as smelling salts.
‘See who … who?’ Glynn rasped.
‘Ember,’ Tarsin shouted. ‘The visionweaver Ember.’
Glynn gaped at him, all the horror of what she had seen fading into simple incredulity. ‘What … what did you say?’ she whispered. Her voice seemed very far away.
‘The Lady Ember,’ Tarsin said, very clearly, as if she was an idiot and deaf as well. ‘Did you see her? Did you learn what has become of her?’
24
Then did Lanalor give to his sister, Alyda, these signs
by which the Unraveller might be known:
half-blind yet seeing all,
who is marked by visioning yet without Darkfall mark
who lives, yet sings the deathsong
who is born, yet is not of the Song of Making
who is gifted from the great waters
who is crowned in bright flames …
LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN
The Prime slapped Glynn hard across the face, but she managed not to react.
‘Tcha! Fools! Did no one have the sense to take the darklin from her and break the trance? People have been known to lose their minds visioning endlessly until a darklin is drained of power.’ Hearing the voice change direction, Glynn risked opening her eyes the merest slit and saw that the Prime had risen and was now speaking to Gif and Leta, both of whom looked worried.
‘The Draaka will not be pleased with this,’ Leta muttered.
‘No she will not,’ the Prime said. ‘What was he trying to do with her anyway?’
‘The legionnaires that brought her back said Tarsin commanded her to invoke the darklin and seek the whereabouts of the missing visionweaver. But they did not speak as if they had seen anything for themselves.’
‘I wonder what she saw,’ the Prime said thoughtfully.
‘The legionnaires said that the drone was stupefied by her visioning, which seems to suggest that, whatever she saw, she was unable to communicate it,’ Gif said.
‘If that is so, this debacle might not be a complete loss,’ the Prime said. ‘Tarsin could be led to believe that the girl saw something, but is incapable of understanding what she saw. Whereupon h
e might very well deign to summon the Draaka.’
‘We might send another darklin with a note, apologising for the servitor’s ineptitude and renewing the offer,’ Leta said eagerly.
‘Aluade had better take it this time,’ Gif said laconically.
Hearing Aluade’s name, Glynn had a sudden vivid mental image of the Iridomi woman as she had been in the darklin vision; rigid and shuddering as the voice of the Chaos spirit poured bile from her mouth. She must have moved in agitation because the Prime was suddenly beside her, peeling an eyelid back.
It was too late for Glynn to roll her eyes back and pretend unconsciousness. Indeed for a split second their gazes locked, but Glynn quickly let her eyes glaze and shook her head, mugging exhaustion and bewilderment. She did not want to be questioned until she had decided what to say, but nor did she want to make herself look too unhealthy in case the Draaka still intended sending her to the citadel, though this seemed highly unlikely in the face of the evening’s events.
‘Do you know where you are?’ the Prime asked.
‘I … I don’t know what you mean,’ Glynn mumbled. ‘We are in the waiting salon in the …’ she stopped, pretending to remember. ‘But how did I get here? I was in the Holder’s apartment and he bade me …’ She winced and tried to look as if she was on the point of swooning again.
‘It is no use questioning her when she is like this. Send for two servitors. They can take her to her room. I will interrogate her in the morning,’ the Prime decided.
Glynn struggled to her feet, exaggerating her unsteadiness, and the Prime peered into her eyes again. Her expression was so cold and disapproving that Glynn wondered if it was really possible that this woman was an agent of the Shadowman, as the darklin vision had suggested. Certainly Solen had been receiving information from inside the Acanthan haven, and it was the Prime who had spilled the acidic soap mix onto Glynn, thereby freeing her mind from the languid grip of the sharap’n. The Chaos spirit claimed that the true Wykka lay quiescent within the active Prime persona, thereby hiding her true nature from its gaze. But even if the Prime persona really believed that she was a draakira and hated Darkfall, Glynn doubted her true self could be entirely switched off, any more than hypnosis victims would act against their deepest nature. The accident with the soap could have been a deliberate prompt from the true Wykka, thereby preserving both persona.
When the servitors arrived, Glynn let herself be led away obediently and somnolently, reminding herself not to place too much stock on the darklin visions, for they could easily be false, despite their vividness. Even so, it would ease her heart to tell Solen what she had seen, because surely forewarned was forearmed. Besides, if he confirmed that the Prime was working with him, then would that not mean the rest of the vision had been true as well.
But when at last she was alone in her room and climbing wearily into her bed, she remembered the stern warning of the manbeast that alerting Solen and the Prime might easily bring about the very fate they would avoid. Of course the brief encounter with the manbeast might also have been a vision, even though he had spoken of the other vision, claiming to have pulled her from it for her own safety. Indeed, he had claimed to be one of the secret manipulators that the Chaos spirit had sensed were operating against it.
But whether or not she believed that the manbeast was real, Glynn did not know if she would be able to see Solen and keep silent about what she knew. Indeed, given the feinna link between them, it might not even be possible. Thinking of the feinna, Glynn emptied her mind and reached out to check on the little animal. It had been deeply unconscious since she had taken over its body and senses to free it from its locked gaze with Kalide, and she was becoming worried, despite the assurances of the feinna link that the little animal was mending fast. She found that the feinna was fine, and withdrew to return to her own body. She was too keyed up to lie still and so she sat up cross-legged on her bed in the darkness. Slowly she replayed for herself the darklin vision, sieving out the information it had contained and trying to decide what was likely to be real. The Draaka and her draakira had been outside the palace, therefore if the vision was true, or even partly true, then they must have been presented to Tarsin. Given what she had just overheard, that presentation might not be long in coming.
In the darklin vision, the Draaka had told the Chaos spirit that she, Glynn, had escaped. If only that would be true! Of course the Chaos spirit had then commanded that she be taken to Iridom, but why, unless this was where she was supposed to betray the Unraveller.
I will not betray anyone, she vowed again, and felt her nails dig into her palms inside her clenched fists. She had said as much to the manbeast, she remembered. She wished she could remember where she had seen him before, but already his image was dimming in her mind.
All at once Glynn remembered the last thing that had happened before she fainted. Indeed it was the reason she had swooned. The Holder had been shouting at her, commanding her to tell him if she had seen the whereabouts of the visionweaver.
The visionweaver Ember.
Hearing this, Glynn decided it might be wise to seem badly enough affected to be unable to be questioned, so when she was hauled to her feet by one of Tarsin’s body servitors, she had faked a faint. She had cracked her head hard enough on the tiles to have made her see stars, and it must have looked convincing because Tarsin ordered them to return her to the Iridomi enclave. Coralyn had been nowhere to be seen then, but no doubt she was watching from some spy hole, since her words made it clear that she or one of her servitors had been spying on them before her second appearance.
Glynn gnawed her lip and tried to replay in her mind the first moments after she had come out of the visioning trance. Had the Holder really said Ember’s name? It was easy to imagine that she had simply misheard, replacing a name she knew with something similar sounding. And even if he had spoken Ember’s name, might it not be another Ember? It would be a mighty coincidence, and yet was it any stranger to find Ember’s name on Keltor, than her face?
The only other possibility was that the mysterious Sheannite visionweaver was Ember. This, of course, had been Glynn’s first stunned thought. But in the end, the fact that the visionweaver was dying was the only argument in favour of that theory, other than that they might have the same or similar-sounding names. Admittedly Ember had entered the water after Glynn and might have crossed to Keltor, but there was no way she could have carried off such a complex charade as pretending to be a visionweaver. And how could she possibly have had the vision that had saved Tarsin’s life?
There were other things that made it highly unlikely, too. If the visionweaver had been Ember, Glynn would certainly have heard her hair colour mentioned. And there had been no mention of the visionweaver having musical abilities. Glynn knew that nothing in all creation would have kept Ember from her music, and there were at least two instruments on Keltor that she might have played easily. And then there was the half-mask she was rumoured to have worn. Ember might have hidden her whole face, given her resemblance to the long-dead Shenavyre, but why would she bother hiding her upper face?
Glynn shook her head, suppressing firmly the insidious thought that if the visionweaver had been Ember, she could have stayed on Keltor. She bit her lip, and firmly quelled a surge of longing for Solen evoked by the thought, lest it waken the feinna. Why wake it only to face another day as a bound prisoner?
All at once she felt exhausted. Forcing herself to lie down and relax, Glynn soon fell into a restless sleep, full of dreams filled with gape-jawed hell hounds aglow with a bluish unnatural light that burned whenever it touched her. Sometimes the manbeasts were chasing her, but more often, they were pursuing Ember while she watched helplessly. Once, Ember was caught and screaming and, another time, it was the feinna the manbeasts tore apart.
But the last dream before waking was of her own world, and again featured the woman whom the police said had found Wind’s suicide note. Instead of being in her apartment, this time she was sitti
ng on a windy bench alongside an older woman who wore an expensive business suit and high heels. Yellow leaves were flying in the wind that was snatching and plucking at her hair like invisible imps as the older woman turned suddenly and advised her not to think about the end of her relationship with her lover, because sometimes thinking about an old pain was like picking a scab.
‘Honey believe me, I know,’ she added, putting her arm around the hunched shoulders of the younger woman. ‘You’re hurting yourself because being hurt by someone you love is something at least. You feel like if he is hurting you he must love you. But the thing is, he’s not hurting you. You are hurting you. It’s over and that’s what you have to get your mind around.’
The other woman gave a shaky sigh and ran her fingers unsteadily under both eyes. ‘The thing is that it’s not over.’
The older woman rolled her eyes. ‘Oh? Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts? This is not what you need and it wouldn’t be fair to a kid.’
‘That’s what I keep telling myself, and that’s even what he said, but I just can’t help feeling that it’s me I’m thinking of, not the … well, you know.’
‘Don’t think “baby”. If you do you’re a goner. It’s not a baby. It’s a problem that you can make go away.’
‘What does that mean? It’s not a baby until I think of it as one?’
‘Look, I don’t want to get into the morality of all this. I think that life is precious but I think a foetus of a few months is no more important than the thousands of people starving in poor countries. I think we’re not evolved enough to be cherishing the spark of life before we can cherish all life. Be practical instead of emotional. You didn’t plan on this. It’s not like you wanted it and changed your mind.’ Despite what seemed to Glynn to be good logic, the older woman’s voice sounded hard and she had the odd feinna-driven thought that, underneath her compassion and concern, she carried a little nugget of anger.
‘No … no, I didn’t plan on it,’ the brown-haired woman sounded tired.