I Can See Clearly Now
Episode 1 of Van Raighan's Last Stand
A Story of the Second Realm
By R.J. Davnall
Copyright 2011 R. J. Davnall
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https://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.com/
Contents
I Can See Clearly Now
About the Author
Van Raighan’s Last Stand
1. I Can See Clearly Now
Wind blasted up the hillside and shattered into whispers on the hedge that lined the canal path. It was impossible to forget how near the Second Realm was. Rel shifted the leather strap of his backpack, trying to loosen his already-stiff shoulder. His boots slapped in the puddles and sucked in the mud of the path.
Ahead, the canal turned slowly North towards the brow above Federas. Rel blinked, squinting against the wind. There were three - four? No, five - women coming his way along the path. Four wore stout travelling dresses in brown and green, but the fifth looked to be wearing purple. An odd group, and an odd time to be leaving Federas, with the trap awaiting Van Raighan still unsprung. Unless they’d been lucky and he’d come early. Or something had gone wrong.
Rel ground his teeth. Far more likely something would go wrong, even after he’d been right to the Court to hone his Clearsight. Twice. Both times, the Clearviewing had shown Van Raighan’s entry to the town, right through to his capture. It stopped, though, almost the moment that the guardsmen surrounded the master thief. Rel would be there, would have to do something. Clearsight never showed you your own part in events.
So Rel had perhaps another hour - clouds covered the sun, but he thought it was still well shy of noon - to get back to the town, talk Sheriff Pollack around again, and get settled in before Van Raighan was due at the Warding Hall.
He resisted the temptation of using Clearsight to see who the women were. The Second Realm was close enough still that it would be easy, but this close he might see something more than faces. He would see who they were soon enough.
A plastic bottle bobbed in the brown canal water. One of the small, white ones shaped with a handle, and a green lid. Rel thought about stopping to fish it out - it was filthy, but if it was watertight enough to float it was worth at least a good meal and a drink. But he didn’t have his fishing rod with him, and trying to reach it with a broken-off branch would risk falling in. If he turned up in front of the Sherriff sopping wet, he might well get sent to Dora in case he caught cold, and then there was no way he’d get free in time for Van Raighan.
Maybe the bottle would still be there later. Rel glanced at the sky, counting hours of daylight remaining against how long the excitement in town was likely to last. Out across the valley, darker cloud and grey haze spoke of another shower closing in. Maybe the bottle would still be there tomorrow.
He hissed through his missing tooth, then caught himself as he realised how close the women had got. He didn’t know the lady in purple - purple linen, not wool - or the plainer-dressed woman next to her, but the other three were familiar. Dora walked in the middle of the group, tiny and slight, her fair hair straw-like and wild as ever, the Four-Knotted cord cinching her faded green robe almost tight enough to give her hips. The only thing not completely underwhelming about her was her eyes; even as she nodded gently to Rel, cheeks rounding slightly with a smile, her eyes were flint and diamond all at once.
Beris Webberat and Notia Tollan made almost as strange companions for the Four Knot as the two out-of-towners. Both scowled at him as they passed. There was no question of stopping to chat. Maybe on a good day, Dora might have a word for him if they were alone out here, but the Second Realm made more than Clearsight complicated.
If Dora was out here, though, with two women who hated the Second Realm and two strangers, something had probably already gone wrong in town. Rel put his head down and picked up his step -
- and noticed that the canal surface wasn’t rippling with the wind. He froze and watched it start moving again, but not all at once. The still patch was following the women, ripples gently sliding back in its wake. Plenty of Children of the Wild were untouched by the wind. The list of known species that would stalk humans was shorter, but still long.
Rel still didn’t move, trying to breathe without using a single muscle. Whatever it was would be able to sense his Gift of Clearsight, even while he wasn’t using it, but maybe it hadn’t noticed. He turned his head slowly, following the still patch along the canal, and surrendered his eyes to Clearviewing.
Icy cold spread up under his eyelids and round into his eye sockets. Suppressing the urge to blink was second-nature, but he could do nothing about the shiver. There was a slight sensation of tension inside his face as if his eyes were sticking out on stalks, and then he Saw Clearly. The canal looked much as it had, except that he could vaguely make out the shape of its muddy bottom. Sparks glittered from the grass and bushes.
He forced himself not to look up. His gut grumbled just thinking about the Realmlessness above. Instead, he kept his eyes on the still patch - not still, of course, to Clearsight. The air danced above the canal and the path, a jumble of tiny motes of a colour that was almost like green. No two ever seemed to move the same way at once.
Nothing special, then. If there had been no motion at all, Rel would have worried, but wherever the Wilder was, it wasn’t powerful enough to manage negation. Instead, it was breaking the wind’s motion up into eddies too small to pick up a hair. It was the trick most Wildren used. On a good day, with a fresh head on his shoulders, Rel might even be able to manage it himself.
Where was the Wilder? The air danced, the grass glittered, but there were no footsteps - the ground still glowed faintly where the women had set their feet - and none of the strain lines that would betray a Wilder concealing itself. For a second a ripple across the water and the grass by the path formed the shape of a giant noose around the women, but that was just Second-Realm logic pushing at him.
Rel looked at the women, already half-way around the bend in the canal, and his mouth ran dry. There were only four of them; the lady in purple was nowhere to be seen. His eyeballs ached with the cold, fought his eyelids, but he forced the blink and Clearsight fled. The lady reappeared.
Gifts of the Second Realm were given to protect humans against the Children of the Wild, but the Gift-Givers, Wildren though they were, had always insisted on protecting themselves too. Among other things, they were invisible to Clearsight.
Rel shook his head, glaring at his feet and trying to rub some warmth back into his face as he walked on. The Gift-Giver clearly wasn’t interested in him, and whatever she wanted with Dora, she could do whether he interfered or not. Dora had to know what she was walking with, though, and Rel trusted her. Strange for three women to be called to receive gifts at once, and strange that Beris and Notia hadn’t needed to be dragged. For that matter, strange for Dora to be going with them. The Four Knot was a Gift, a form of Guiding, but Wildren were seldom keen to have one around.
Whatever was going on, though, the women were as safe as anyone could be out here, and Van Raighan wouldn’t wait for Rel to make a fool of himself trying to talk to a Gift-Giver. He stretched out his stride and tried to step faster. It wasn’t that he wanted to get away from the Gift-Giver. He just had to be in Federas quickly.
The canal swung around the hillside above the concrete ruin of the old city and then turned West again where Federas clung to the side of the valley. It was a small town even by modern standards, dwarfed by the old city, though every building was stone and slate, not wood.
Rel took the first track down off
the canal path. It had been stepped once, but the paving was starting to disintegrate and the mud made it slick and treacherous. He got both his backpack straps over his shoulders - they pinched at his neck, too tight since his shoulders had started to broaden - and descended with his arms half-extended for balance, leaning slightly backwards.
Pushing Dora and the Gift-Giver from his mind again, Rel threaded his way between the houses and down to Main Street. The streets were bustling with every kind of activity people thought looked normal. No-one wanted to do anything to alert Van Raighan, but everyone wanted to be on hand to see him taken. Every housewife in Federas seemed to be about, standing in twos and threes looking over each other’s shoulders and trying to find new things to say about the weather. Children ran everywhere, apart from the few who hung out of first-floor windows. A couple had even climbed onto rooftops and would have been grounded for a month if their mothers weren’t so distracted.
The Warding Hall was at the bottom of Main Street, the grey hulks of the old city looming behind it like monstrous tombstones. There were fewer people here - maybe the Sherriff had actually managed to get a little way through everyone’s thick skulls on the subject of not