Havenstar (3 page)

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And no more
did the lands beyond the sea send their sailors; nor yet did the
Margravate of Malinawar see its own sails return on the wind, decks
piled high with the fragrant oils of Premantra and the golden cloth
of Brazis. No more did the caravans come from Yedron and
Bellisthron and the lands behind Beyond. All about was Ley. All
about was unstable, and Humankind feared to cross. Malinawar was as
eight rafts afloat on a storm-soaked ocean, and none knew the way
to swim.

—The Rending I:
7: 8-11

On the
outskirts of Kibbleberry village a party of Tricians rode past the
mapmaker’s shop at a brisk trot: six women and five men, guarded by
twenty of the Defenders and followed by a baggage train of servants
and kinesis-chantors. The Tricians might have been clad in the
normal brown and gray of the unencoloured, but their clothes were
of the finest deer leathers, soft linens and plush goat wool; the
domain-symbols they wore around their necks were of gold, some even
studded with jewel-stones although it was doubtful Chantry would
have approved of that. The Defenders, all of them as noble as those
they guarded, were lavishly accoutred and armed.

In the shop,
Keris Kaylen laid her work aside to watch them pass.
Even the
servants are better dressed and mounted than anyone in
Kibbleberry
, she thought. She felt no envy. Tricians and their
retinue were as remote from her as the forests of the Eighth
Stability, even though fellowships such as this one passed along
the road often enough. She’d never spoken to one of their number
and had no reason to think she ever would; none of them ever
stopped. If they had needed a map, the purchase would have been
done long since through an intermediary. Tricians rarely made
commercial transactions themselves.

These were
bound for the Unstable, yet they seemed happy, laughing and joking
and flirting and never thinking about the dangers ahead once they
crossed the kinesis chain. They were young, they were beautiful,
they seemed carefree—yet Keris would not have changed places with
any of them. Too many of these same young men would lose their
lives one day as Defenders; too many of those young women would
raise their children alone, only to see their sons die or be
tainted in the Unstable just as their husbands had been. The very
word ‘Trician’ was derived from some longer and more ancient
expression supposed to have meant ‘of my father’s arming.’ Tricians
were born to bear arms, or to marry those who did, just as their
parents had. It was not a life Keris envied.

Better, she
thought, to be a canny ley-lit mapmaker like her father, who was
scornful of noisy young Tricians and their arms and their
delicately-bred horses. ‘In the Unstable they and their chantors
just attract trouble,’ he had remarked once. ‘Better to be
solitary. Wiser to be quietly elusive, than to be challenging.
Never take your pilgrimage with a guide that hires Defenders, Keri.
It means the fellow doesn’t know his job.’

One of the
young men saw her looking out of the shop door and winked. The girl
next to him giggled and said something that made him laugh, then
they were all gone from her sight. With a shrug, Keris lowered her
eyes once more to her work. None of them mattered.

And then her
head jerked up again as she realised what she had just seen—beyond
the road, beyond the fields and the wood. Or rather what she had
not seen.

There was a
line of mountains beyond the stab, and on a clear day it was
possible to see the whole range from the shop. Keris had been able
to name all the main peaks since she was just four years old: the
Jag, the Oven, the Shadow…the Axe Head…the Snood and the Wimple.
All told, they were the Impassables. And now the Axe Head was
missing. For three days they’d all been hidden by cloud, but now
that the weather had cleared—

In a daze she
slipped off her stool and went to stand in the doorway, to stare.
It was true. It really had gone. There was the range, there were
all the other peaks, but the Axe Head had vanished. There was a
space on the skyline that gaped vacantly like the cavity left by a
pulled tooth.

She whirled
from the door, wanting to run inside to tell someone, but then
stopped. There was only her mother, and it would be better if she
was not bothered. Not now. Keris sighed. Not for the first time,
she wished her father was home.

And then she
remembered the roof-mender at work returfing part of the barn roof.
He wasn’t a learned or particularly knowledgeable man, but at least
he was somebody to tell. She left the shop to go to the barn,
walking around the outside of the house so as not to disturb her
mother. She found Articus Medrop arranging cut turf on his hod at
the foot of his ladder.

‘Master
Medrop—’ she began, but he didn’t let her finish.

‘Good turf
I’ve got you, look.’ He showed her some, waggling it at her. He was
all lean muscle: arms, shanks and calves, even his face tautly
sinewed. ‘You tell your Dad when he comes home. This came from
Jeckitt’s top field, and it’s full of snow bells and mauves. Your
roof’ll be a picture next spring. Had Carasma’s own job trying to
persuade the Rule Office to let me cut it, I can tell you!’

She
interrupted. ‘Master Medrop, have you seen the Axe Head?’

He looked at
her imperturbably. ‘Oh aye. That I have. Or not seen it, more like.
It’s gone.’ He bent to stack more turf on the hod. ‘Best forgotten
now, lass.’

‘Forgotten?
How can one forget a mountain?’

‘Easy. It’s
gone, hasn’t it? ’Twas far away, and never did concern us even when
it was there. Beyond Order, the Impassables. As long as stability
lives—and it will if we live right—why worry your head about it?
Lass, it’s better you concern yourself with that there roof beam in
the barn. Won’t last more than another year or two, and all my
returfing ain’t going to repair a beam that’s about to
crumble.’

She allowed
herself to be diverted. ‘We did plant a replacement tree about five
years back, but the Rule Office says we have to wait until that
one’s been growing ten years before we can cut another for the
beam. And we’ve had our name down for a lightning-struck tree, or a
wind-felled one, but the list of people waiting is an ell long.
It’ll be years before we get a beam.’ It was a sore point with her
father, who thought the Rule Office ought to be more flexible about
allowing wood to be imported from the Unstable.

Articus
grunted. ‘They won’t like it if the roof of your barn falls in.
That’ud make a change to the landscape, and what then? I’ll mention
the state of the beam to the Office. Mayhap they’ll
reconsider.’

She thanked
him and went back to the shop, but couldn’t resist another glance
up at the snow-dredged peaks of the mountains. They’d always seemed
so unchangeable, so impervious to everything, even time. She
couldn’t recall ever seeing any alterations to their outlines, yet
perhaps it had been an unreal expectation to assume they would
never change. After all, they no longer seemed to resemble the
objects they were named after… Snoods were the accepted way for a
married woman to contain her hair at the back of her head, but no
snood she had ever seen resembled the Snood Mountain of the
Impassables. If anything it looked more like a chantor’s tricorne.
And the Wimple bore no resemblance to the obligatory headgear of
widows either.

For the first
time, she wondered just how many changes there’d been in the
thousand years since the Rending, but it was not an idea that she
wanted to dwell on.

With one last
lingering glance at the new silhouette of the Impassables, she
returned to her stool and her work.

It was warm
for the first day of summer. Sometimes, there in the First
Stability in the shadow of the mountains, the season’s warmth came
late, but that year it promised to be otherwise. Sunlight shafted
in through the open door of the shop to warm the cat where it dozed
in a furry ball on the floor near a pile of vellum squares. The
breeze that nudged a scroll of parchment along the counter top was
pleasantly balmy.

Lightly
dressed, with her arms bare and her skirt immodestly hitched up, a
habit which might have prompted the Trician’s wink, she enjoyed the
feel of the sun on her legs as she laboured over a master
chart.

She dipped a
fine-haired brush into a pot of paint and hesitated briefly before
dabbing colour on to the oblong sheet of parchment pinned to the
mapboard in front of her. The hesitation was an ingrained ritual,
something she did without real thought, in deference to her father.
He disliked her adding colour to maps, and had only accepted the
idea after she’d shown they sold better that way. His acceptance
had not stopped him from muttering things about new-fangled ideas
and silly feminine frivolities, utterances which had induced a
sense of guilt in her every time she loaded her brush with
vegetable dye—hence her pause.

Yet when her
brush did move on to tinge the trees of Taggart’s Wood with green,
the colour added life to the ink work already done. Under the
strokes the map began to live, and she was careful not to allow her
desire to turn a chart into a work of art interfere with the map’s
technical accuracy. She was not a mapmaker’s daughter for
nothing.

The cat near
the door snuffled and stirred uneasily. Keris worked on, thinking
often of that awful gap in the mountains, more occasionally of her
mother and her brother—unhappy, worrying thoughts. Mostly though,
she concentrated on the picture taking shape in front of her. The
First Stability, nestling in the foothills of the Impassables—darn
it, she would have to blank out the Axe Head later—oval in shape
with its numerous towns and villages and one large city, Drumlin.
On the other side of the River Flow, the Second Stability, smaller,
perfectly round and much flatter. And somewhere in between, the
Wanderer, but she would not put that in yet. Not until her father
came home with the Bitch’s new coordinates.

Her brush
moved on to the Third Stability, the border chaotic where it
followed the contours of a more rugged landscape…

It was the cat
that broke her concentration. It raised its head from the
flagstoned floor, ears pricked, and miaowed. Outside Keris heard
the sounds of riders turning in from the road that passed by the
front door. She glanced up in time to see four horses, stolid
plough animals with two riders between them, coming into the side
yard. She began to clean her brush. She’d made it herself from cat
hair, and was not about to leave it to dry stiff with paint while
she attended to customers.

The cat, named
Yerrie for reasons long forgotten, stood, stretched elegantly and
jumped up on to the counter top. She patted its head absently and
moved the map she had been working onto the shelf out of sight. She
pulled her skirt down and quickly ran her fingers through her hair
in an attempt to tidy it. Having reached the age of full majority
that summer, she was of pilgrimage age, but was ruefully aware that
to those who visited the shop she appeared younger. Her figure was
more boyish than womanly and she’d resigned herself to the
knowledge it would probably stay that way until she’d borne
children. Worse still, her nondescript brown hair streaked unevenly
into half a dozen indeterminate shades, and her skin freckled in
the sun, a combination that made her appear more hoydenish than
mature.

There was
nothing pretty about her face, she knew. Her pale grey eyes were
unremarkable, although they could tinge blue on bright days, or
darken to slate in winter, as leaden as snow-laden skies. Her nose
was too long, her mouth too wide and her chin too solid for beauty,
while her hands were too large and her feet too long for grace—but
for all that, she was more ordinary than ugly. She was, in fact,
the kind of woman men passed in the street without giving a second
glance, failing to note any possibility of passion or intelligence
or character simply because the face and the figure promised only
banality.

She regretted
the lack of beauty, but never dwelt on it; she’d never had any
reason to do so. Her entire sexual experience consisted of
deterring one or two pimply village youths from thrusting a hand
down her blouse on the odd occasion when they’d seen an opportunity
in the cold dark of a winter’s afternoon. If this was what being a
woman meant, she saw little advantage in possessing an
attractiveness that would only give her more such problems.

However, as
she watched the young woman of about her own age slide down from
her horse into the waiting hold of her companion, she did wish she
looked a little older. People listened more when they thought a
person was old enough to have experience.

Newly weds,
she thought, wanting to get their pilgrimage over and done with
before they settle down to raise a family. She’d seen many
such.

They came into
the shop together, more than a little anxious, tired and dusty and
in need of a bath and rest.

‘Greetings,’
the man said, making an appropriate kinesis with his hand moving
from forehead to mouth. ‘We were advised we’d need a map of the
First Stability, and that this was the place to come. Is the
mapmaker here?’

She shook her
head as she returned the kinesis, hiding a momentary irritation.
‘I’m sorry, no.’
And his son’s not here either, as he should be.
But I am, and what’s the matter with me?
‘Can I help? You are
pilgrims?’

‘Yes, from the
Second Stability,’ the woman said with an anguished sigh that came
from somewhere deep inside her.

Keris was
immediately sympathetic. ‘A bad crossing?’

‘Terrible.
There were two who were tainted—
two
! And six separate ley
lines to cross, four of them uncharted. The guide said he hadn’t
had such a trip in years…’