Angel Isle (20 page)

“There won’t be any,” said Ribek, amiably. “We are guests in your city, so of course we’ll behave ourselves.”

The official stared at him icily.

“Let me advise you, sir,” he said, “that you have caused the Provosts of the City of Larg to be summoned from their evening leisure and convene in emergency session. They will not take kindly to any display of frivolity. Ah…”

Before Ribek could answer he turned away to greet a plump, bald man who had come hurrying in, panting slightly, and with sweat streaming down his flushed cheeks. The first official beckoned to the Gate Sergeant, and the three of them talked together in low voices.

A younger man came in, placed a ledger on the reading desk by the door and handed a large book bound in black leather to the plump man, who opened it on a table at the center of the room and started to leaf through it. The pages were thick and yellow, and creaked faintly as he turned them. He found what he wanted and started to read.

A gong sounded in the entrance hall and the big double doors were thrown open by two more uniformed men, who then crossed the room and opened another pair of doors in the wall opposite where Ribek and Maja were sitting. Two older men, wearing golden velvet gowns, despite the heat, and strange, floppy black velvet caps with a jeweled brooch at the center, walked through. The man at the desk entered their names in his ledger. The plump man bowed to them as they passed. They nodded to him, and he picked up the book and followed them.

“Proctors,” muttered Ribek, and gestured toward the double line of portraits. “Same outfit all the way along, apart from those fellows in armor over in the corner. Look at the dates on ’em, too. Bottom row’s three-hundred–odd years later than the top row. Fat fellow will be Clerk of the Court—something like that.”

More Proctors followed, in twos and threes. Maja picked up their feelings as they passed—irritation or anxiety or excitement, but from all of them a sort of bewildered surprise. The last one hurried in and through, followed by the man with the ledger. Two men with short pikes came in from the entrance hall and stood guard, the outer doors closed, then the inner ones.

More waiting. The Gate Sergeant now was too nervous to stand still, and paced to and fro until one of the inner doors opened and an arm beckoned to him from beyond. He made an effort, squared both jaw and shoulders and marched through, every inch the steadfast man-at-arms. The doors were too thick for voices to carry, but his inner nerves and fright were signals strong enough for Maja to follow as he marched to the center of the room and halted smartly in front of a long, weighty table—ancient oak, she could tell—and saluted. Someone asked a question. He answered stolidly, telling his story.

More talk, some argument, a decision, and an order. The inner doors opened, and a guard gestured to Ribek to come through. Maja followed him.

The room was much as she had pictured it, in the same grand style as the anteroom but six times the size. Tall windows overlooked the square, and yet more portraits of past Proctors lined the remaining walls. Yes, the Proctors sat in a row of throne-like chairs behind the table, with the Clerk of the Court at one end with his assistant beside him. The black book and the ledger lay open in front of them.

The guard who had brought them led Ribek and Maja to face the Proctors at the center of the table and withdrew. The Proctor at the center of the line tinkled a little bell and turned to the Clerk.

“Please proceed, Master Tongal,” he said.

“Very good, Master President,” said the Clerk. He looked at Ribek.

“Your name, please?”

“Ribek Ortahlson, and this is my half-sister Maja.”

“And the purpose of your journey?”

“I and my sister had been traveling south with our half-sister and brother to negotiate future marriages for them among a branch of our people who live beyond Tarshu. We were halted by the fighting there and decided to return north. But we learned that men and boys using the Imperial Highways were being rounded up at way stations and being impressed into the army. To avoid this we chose to use byroads, and so came to your city. We wanted no more than to pass through it, but we were stopped by the barrier because we were carrying a few magical objects.

“We were advised by a passing merchant that our best course was to hire a pass-box at the gate, to enable us to carry them through the city. We were resting on the bridge—we’ve come a long way, and were tired—when the Gate Sergeant arrested me for carrying out magical procedures and brought me here. May I explain what I was doing?”

“Please.”

With the same quiet reasonableness Ribek told the court what he had told the Gate Sergeant.

“It’s a bit like hearing a bat squeak,” he added. “Most people can’t, because the pitch is too high for them, but I know two or three people who can. There’s nothing magical about that. The same about hearing moving water—it just runs in my family. A big river like yours can be really interesting.”

A Proctor near the other end of the line rapped his knuckles on the table twice. The rest turned to look at him.

“This is a crucial point,” he said. “If the procedures were not after all magical, then there is no need to wake the Sleeper. The Clerk of the Court tells us that he can find no precedent for the use of this clause in the Standing Orders, so we have no guidance. All we can be sure of is that to wake the Sleeper may have the most momentous results, affecting the whole city, our whole way of life. Perhaps the barrier will be removed. Do we really want the dangerous magics of the Empire to come flooding into our pleasant city? Do we want to be drawn into the so-called Watchers’ war against the Pirates?”

A second double rap broke into the mutters of agreement. Heads turned toward the sound.

“A further point,” said the rapper. “If we believe the witness that he can hear the speech of the river—and there is nothing to show that he is not one of the common enough type of lunatic who fancies that he can hear voices—why should we not also believe him that the practice is not magical, or at least not magical in the sense of pertaining to the type of magic against which our city is so fortunately guarded?”

Another rap.

“I wholly agree,” said the new speaker. “Furthermore, if it were magical in that kind of way, surely it would have been stopped at the barrier.”

Rap after rap, with the Clerk’s assistant desperately trying to get it all written down.

“Now look. This won’t do. The instructions are absolutely clear. You’re just trying—”

“Nonsense. We’ve got to do what’s in the best interests of Larg. Are we going to upset everything for the sake of one madman?”

Maja stopped listening. Something was happening. Not here, but soon. Coming. Distracted by the surface events, Maja had paid no attention to what was happening outside the Council Chamber. It was all there, of course, at the back of her consciousness—behind her the almost empty anteroom, to her left the bustling entrance hall with the river flowing majestically beyond it, opposite and to her right smaller rooms, offices and such, perhaps, but over in the far right corner, though the walls there seemed to be no different from the rest of the room, just paneling and portraits, a small blank patch where everything seemed to stop at the surface of the wall.

By now she’d come across enough wards to be able to tell from the very density of its blankness how powerful this one was, and so guess the immense power of the magic it was warding, here in the very heart of unmagical Larg. And what she had felt, what had drawn her attention, was the first faint beginnings of a change, a weakening of the ward, a faint seeping through of the power beyond it. It was unlike anything she had felt before. She started to shudder.

“Hold me,” she gasped.

Ribek put his arm round her and hugged her firmly to his side, but the shuddering wouldn’t stop. Through it she heard snatches of what was going on. The tinkle of the bell, “…motion is that…as either a product of the witness’s lunacy, or not truly magical activity of the sort referred to…and those against…carried with Proctors Benter and Gald dissenting—”

“Hold it! Hold it!”

The Gate Sergeant’s bellow overwhelmed the shuddering. He was standing by her side with pike gripped in both hands as if he intended to use it.

“Orders is orders!” he yelled above the growing hubbub. “Twelve years, morning after morning, I’ve been reading out that clause Three-a there. Made no sense to me, but when it happened I did what it said, ’cause I know an order when I hear one. Same with what the gentleman there read out of his black book. That’s an order, and you don’t argue it to and fro, you do what it says. So now where’s this Sleeper, and how…?”

Maja raised a juddering arm and pointed at the far corner.

“Right,” cried the Gate Sergeant. “Out of the way there…”

Clamor filled the room, only to be stilled in an instant. A thin whisper came out of the air, faint and dry as the scuttle of a mouse in a hayloft.

“I have woken. Bring the strangers to me.”

“Maja—she can’t stand strong magic. It will kill her,” said Ribek in a low, strained voice. He’d spoken to empty air, but the whisper answered.

“I will protect her.”

The shuddering died away. Ribek lifted her into his arms.

“This way then,” said the Gate Sergeant. “It’s where the lassie was pointing, over in this corner. Stand aside, please.”

Maja could have walked, but she needed to cling to Ribek, to his beautiful ordinariness, although something else, something invisible, was now also holding and protecting her. A door had appeared now in the corner, its carving and gilding matching the other doors in the council chamber. It hadn’t been there when she had looked before, but she sensed nothing from it as the Gate Sergeant tried its handle, found it unlocked, opened it and held it for Ribek to carry her through.

“Do I come too, ma’am?” the Gate Sergeant croaked.

“No need,” said the whisper. “You have done well, Sergeant. My blessing is on you and yours, and on this whole, loved city. Farewell.”

The Gate Sergeant hesitated, turned, stopped, turned back, and forced his voice to function.

“You’re going then, ma’am?”

“Yes. The covenant is broken, and when all is settled I may go.”

The Gate Sergeant saluted and closed the door.

“Phew!” said Ribek.

“You can put me down now,” said Maja. “I’m all right. Someone’s shielding me. Like Jex. Only…” Only so much more powerfully than Jex could have done. He would have been utterly overwhelmed by what now surrounded them.

She looked around. They were in a plain, stone corridor dimly lit by ordinary-looking lanterns with unmagical flames in them. No doors opened off it. They went along it, Ribek moving with short, effortful steps as if he were walking through something much denser than air, and then down a flight of stone steps.

“We’ll be well underground now,” Ribek muttered. “Land slopes up from the river. Ah, this looks like it.”

In front of them the passage ended, with an open door on the right. Maja had never heard him sound so nervous. Like a shy schoolboy, she thought. She herself felt utterly unafraid. There was a kindliness in the shield around her, like the mother’s love she had never really known. Hoping to share some of that with him, she took his hand as they reached the doorway.

“Come in.”

This time the whisper came through human lips, a voice full of human weariness. They crept into the room.

It was a very ordinary space, stone-walled, windowless, unadorned. But for the vaulted roof it might have been a storeroom in a well-built farmhouse. At the same time, Maja recognized that it was extremely old, far older than the Council Chamber they had just left, older even than the ancient walls of Larg, almost as old as the hills. And despite the shielding that wrapped her round, she knew it for a place of power.

There was no furniture in it apart from an iron bedstead. On it a dark green bedspread stitched with what Maja guessed were magical symbols, though she was unable to sense them through her shield. White sheets and pillowcase, looking as if they had been laundered yesterday. On the pillow a skull.

No, not quite. A head next thing to a skull, hairless, the almost transparent skin drawn tight over the fleshless bone, the mouth a slit, invisible lips drawn in between toothless jaws, the eyes clouded over with a gray, bloodshot film.

The slit of a mouth opened, revealing the two thin lines of the lips, so dark a purple they were almost black. They barely moved to release their whisper.

“Welcome. I am the Sleeper, Guardian of Larg. Two hundred years and more I have waited here for you, though under the covenant between myself and the Watchers I could not stir to help you. And now, though they have broken the covenant, there is little I can do. All but the last shreds of my power are gone.

“You, child. What is your name?”

“I’m Maja Urlasdaughter,” whispering too, as if in the presence of the dead. “My friend is Ribek Ortahlson. We come from the Valley.”

“Of course. I knew your ancestors, Meena and Tilja, Alnor and Tahl. With Lananeth I was the earliest of the Ropemaker’s helpers.”

“You’re Zara! You’re in the story we tell in the Valley! You were Lord Kzuva’s magician!”

The corpse-face woke with the ghost of a smile.

“I used that name. When our first tasks were done, and the major demons bound beneath the earth, Lananeth chose to return to natural life and die in human time. I stayed by the Ropemaker’s side.

“By then he had other helpers. His is a restless soul. He fretted to be away from his task, back in the life he knew, exploring and learning. With our agreement he bound us into a covenant that during his absences we should cooperate for the general good of the Empire. Time passed, and all seemed well. Before he last left he told me, and no one else, that he had discovered the gateway into another universe, and there was one extremely difficult task that he could at last accomplish there, and there alone. He could not tell when he would return. I was already old and weary, and asked to be released from my binding and my tasks, and he agreed.