Havenstar (22 page)

I’m
ley-lit
, Keris thought.
I can’t be tainted, yet I’m
frightened. How much worse it must be for the ley-unlit.

‘Let us
perform kineses,’ Portron said, and dismounted to kneel on the
ground. ‘Reverence, I think,’ he added, referring to the second of
the four daily devotions.

‘What’s the
point? The Holy Books say the Maker can’t see us when we’re in the
Unstable,’ Baraine grumbled, but as the others dismounted one by
one and went down on left knee, right hand to the heart, he joined
them. Even Scow participated in the rituals, although Keris noticed
that his gaze never left the line for a moment. It was worse for
him, she realised. Davron was his friend. Meldor too perhaps, but
he couldn’t see what was happening to them any more than Quirk,
Corrian or Graval could.

Hand from
heart to forehead, signifying the sincerity of one’s thoughts; both
hands to right knee, showing piety; forehead to knee, indicating
reverence; fingers curling in submission... ‘So far, so good,’ she
whispered to Scow. Right forefinger to earlobe, signifying
willingness to listen to the word of the Maker... ‘They’ve reached
the other side and nothing changed that I could see.’

He smiled
gratefully.

A few minutes
later Davron was back, without Meldor. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s
get moving. Corrian, you first. Lead your animals. You can’t ride
through a ley line unless you’ve got a mount that’s trained to
it.’

Corrian
dismounted, groaning. ‘Middendamn,’ she said, ‘in the past when
I’ve felt this stiff, at least I’d been riding the right sort of
animal.’ She leered at Davron. ‘Lead on, laddie.’

They set off,
Corrian stumbling on the unevenness of the ground, yet doing her
best to hurry. Her pipe was clamped tight in her mouth, but the
pipeweed had gone out, an indication of how flustered she was.

The minutes
dragged on as Portron continued his devotions and the rest dropped
out one by one to watch the ley line. Quirk started biting his
hangnails. Baraine snorted contemptuously in his direction. When
Corrian was safe, Davron returned and took Graval. Still there
appeared to be nothing unusual happening within the line, and if
Davron was tense, he allowed none of it to show on his face.
Portron followed Graval, then it was Scow’s turn.

Baraine looked
relaxed; Quirk was almost turning himself inside out with worry.
Davron should have taken him first
, Keris thought.
He
can’t realise just how scared the man is.

‘Quirk reminds
me of what I once was,’ Scow had said. Scow the farm boy, so unsure
of his worth that he had been unable to believe that the woman he
loved could possibly love him back. And Quirk was an ineffectual
man with no innate sense of his own value. Piers had once remarked
that such men easily fell prey to the Unmaker’s tainting. There was
nothing inside them to give them the strength to resist ley when it
attacked. She was pierced by a feeling of tragic inevitability.
Quirk was going to be tainted and there was nothing any of them
could do to stop it.

Baraine
grinned as Davron chose Quirk next. ‘Careful you don’t foul
yourself, boy,’ he said.

She doubted
Quirk heard him. As he walked into the line, pulling his mount and
one of Baraine’s mules, his face was a picture of utter misery. She
made a kinesis against bad luck.

When Davron
and Quirk were halfway across the line, the ground erupted beneath
their feet. ‘Back!’ Davron shouted. ‘Leave the animals!’ He himself
was still mounted, and he swung his horse through a spray of earth
and rock, reaching out to grab Quirk with the intention of hauling
him up on to the front of his saddle. Quirk dodged him and ignored
his shouts. He’d dropped the reins of his own mount, but he was
still struggling to calm the pack-mule.

‘Leave it!’
Davron roared.

Still Quirk
would not leave the beast.

Damn you,
Baraine,
Keris thought, dry-mouthed.
This is your
doing.

Something was
being pushed up out of the soil in front of the two men. Rocks.
Boulders, like huge mushrooms. Earth cascaded off them, knocking
Quirk to the ground and unseating Davron. The crossings-horse took
off towards Baraine and Keris; Davron fell badly. A wave of colour
swirled through the air. Purple, a deep rich purple, billowed
through the indigo. It engulfed Quirk momentarily, then dissipated
like steam from a boiling pot.

Davron lay
unmoving.

Without
thinking, Keris grabbed Baraine by the arm. ‘Come on, we’re closer
than the others. We have to help.’

Baraine
resisted her. ‘You’re mad! I’m not risking my neck for someone so
stupid he’d die for a pack animal! That—that tainted brain!’

She released
him to pluck her bow from her back and tighten the string. ‘Who’s
the coward now?’ she asked savagely as she dived into the ley line.
She felt the evil then. It engulfed her, soaked into her pores.
Stench and power and danger were inseparable. The ground was still
heaving. Fingers of rock thrust further upwards. They were as
yellow as the fyrcat that had attacked them. She staggered as she
ran, vaguely aware that Baraine, goaded by her accusation of
cowardice, had indeed followed her.

She reached
Quirk first, half-stooped towards him, and halted in horror. He
wasn’t Quirk. He was already changed. Tainted. She had an
impression of flickering colour, of a skin that was no longer skin,
of a smooth greenness, of patterns like painted eyes, of an almost
saurian face on a still human head. He was half-covered with earth
and his body was twisted, knotted—like rope. He was changing before
her eyes, and the transformation was hideous. He screamed,
endlessly, with pain.

She staggered
on to Davron. He was half up, pushing himself away from the ground.
A shower of earth caught them both, and she dipped her head to
shield her eyes.

‘You damned
fool,’ he said, the words wrenched out of him, full of pain. She
wasn’t sure whether he was referring to her or to Quirk.

She turned
back to ask Baraine to help her support Davron, expecting to find
him right behind her. Instead he was some way back, standing still,
pooled in yellowish light. Bands of ochre played around him,
twining across his body, between his legs. Yet he did not seem
afraid. There was a cynical half-smile on his face as if he was
listening to something he knew was only partially true but which
amused him nonetheless. It was a look that froze her to the
bone.

Turning back
to Davron, she found he was staring past her to Baraine. ‘Oh
midden,’ he whispered. ‘The Unmaker.’ He stood up, leaning against
her. ‘Kaylen, in the next few minutes you’re going to pay for being
foolish enough to follow us into the line.’ He took her by the
shoulders, facing her now, fingers digging in hard, his voice
intense with urgency. She felt an unpleasant tingling through the
cloth of her shirt where he touched her but had no time to think
about it. The eyes that looked into hers were not angry, as she had
expected them to be. They were filled with fear, no, something more
than fear. Something more stark. And his concern was for her, not
himself. He had to take a deep breath before he could even speak
again. ‘Get out of here if you can. If you can’t, then prove
yourself worthy of your father. I cannot help you. Now move.’ He
pushed her away, back towards her horses and safety, while he
turned to Baraine.

‘Valmair,’ he
shouted. ‘He has no hold over you unless you grant it to him!’

She tried to
run, but tripped on moving ground and fell flat. Baraine turned,
smiling towards them both. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘He has just
explained that.’

Keris
struggled to rise as Davron answered, but the ground would not stay
still.

‘The price is
your soul.’

‘I know that
too,’ Baraine said. ‘But what use is a soul if one has eternal
life? He offers me nothing that I have not already yearned for,
Storre—nothing.’

‘Minions can
always die from wounds or accidents, Baraine. Immortality is a
myth, no more than immunity from disease and old age.’

She’d never
seen anything more chilling than the smile Baraine gave the guide,
so completely without humanity. Davron reached out to her, hauling
her to her feet by the yoke of her jerkin without taking his eyes
off the Trician. ‘Keris, please try,’ he whispered, begging her to
move, pushing her away from him, still without looking at her.

She tried to
move, but never finished the first step. Something came ploughing
towards them both, churning its way down the length of the ley
line. It was huge, vaguely insect-like, and heart-stoppingly awful.
It rushed at them so fast there was no time for Keris to grab for
her knife. She dropped her staff and bow and dived through the air
to the right; Davron broke to the left.

He moved
faster than anyone she had ever seen, even her father. He had a
throwing knife in each hand long before she’d even managed to get
to her feet; one hit the creature in the eye, the second thudded
home deep into its throat.

Then a
sweeping antenna whipped across to hit him full in the chest. It
was studded with thorns the size of a man’s hand and it ripped the
shirt from him, to score scratches deep into his flesh. She was
dimly aware he was wearing an amulet that had been hidden under his
shirt. She glimpsed the symbol on it and felt the shock of
recognition, but there was no time to think about its
implications.

By this time
she had managed to get a hand to her own knife. She didn’t have any
trouble with the distance this time, the animal was looming over
her like a cliffside. She whipped the blade one and a half turns
into the other side of its throat.

It collapsed
then, although it was probably Davron’s knives that had done the
trick. Hers was just an extra. Davron grabbed at her as she tried
to make up her mind which way to run to avoid the toppling
body.

‘Typical
bloody woman,’ he said, yanking her to safety. ‘Can’t ever make up
her mind.’

‘Typical
bloody man,’ she snapped back, ‘always so damn sure he knows what’s
best for a woman.’ She was grateful though, and if he’d been anyone
else she probably would have fallen into his arms in tears. Instead
she just glared and tried not to think about the amulet he wore. It
had grown into his flesh, was part of him, melded into his skin. It
had a cross on it. The cross of wrongness, within a diamond. A
parody of the plus sign of chantry symbolism.

The cross of
wrongness—the symbol of the Unmaker and his Minions.

She looked
around for Baraine, but he seemed to have disappeared.

‘Oh midden,’
Davron said again, dabbing ineffectually at the blood welling up
from the scratch marks on his chest. ‘I think the beast has fallen
on poor Quirk. Let’s have a look.’ They skirted the body trying not
to think of what they might find on the other side. ‘A
cross-country tramp just to get around the thing,’ he muttered.

She resisted
an impulse to touch him, to tend his bleeding, to seek support for
herself just by contact with another human being.
Remember the
sigil, you fool!

Quirk had not
been flattened after all. He appeared untouched. If it was Quirk.
Keris had a hard time trying to convince herself that this ...
person was indeed the nervy youth from Drumlin. He was only
semiconscious, which was probably just as well. He would need time
to get acquainted with himself again and she doubted if he was in
any fit state to start. He was naked, lying on his side. What had
been done to him had been carefully thought out. Whatever was
responsible for his tainting had known of his diffidence and had
taken the indefinite nature of his personality and made it his
bodily reality. He was still human, yet he was a chameleon, fated
to be always attuned to the background behind him, always fading
away into his surroundings, of indefinite colour, blurred edges and
partial invisibility.

She turned
away and was spectacularly sick.

‘Stop that,’
Davron said, without a trace of sympathy. ‘We’ve got to get him out
of here.’

‘Better he
died—’

‘That’s not
for you to decide.’

She opened her
mouth to say she did not know what, and closed it again. Suddenly,
out of nowhere, a stranger stood before them, with his arm around
Baraine’s shoulders, and the sight of him took her breath away.

A man— No, not
a man. A god. Tall, naked, spectacular. Large. Large in body, large
in personality. Large elsewhere too; ‘well-hung’ was the phrase
she’d heard her brother and his friends bandy about. He exuded musk
and sexual tension; sweat glistened across his skin. He was
gorgeous. And totally evil.

She wanted to
close her eyes, to refuse to see, because she knew who he was.

He was Carasma
the Unmaker.

~~~~~~~

Lord Carasma
exists in true Chaos at the heart of ley, for there, power is to be
found. To extend his realm must he subvert Humankind to his
bidding. Blessed are the ley-lit who resist his blandishments,
damned are they who obey his behest.

—The Rending
XII: 23: 7-9

It never
occurred to Keris that it was ever possible to
see
the
Unmaker. He was a figure of horror tales, a nebulous, fabulous
being akin to—although less than—the Maker, and one didn’t expect
to meet Him. Carasma the Unmaker was portrayed in the holy writings
as taking on human dimensions when he tried to pervert the holy
knights of the past, but appearing to living people in present
times? To
her
? She knew he often subverted the ley-lit into
being his Minions, but she had imagined this was achieved by some
cosmic struggle within the mind of those who were tempted. She had
not expected a personal appearance.