Havenstar (8 page)

She laid the
knives aside and delved deeper into the packs.

By the time
she’d spread all they contained out on the floor, her hands were
shaking with shock. With helpless pain, she noted someone had even
removed her father’s wooden leg and sent that back, but her real
shock stemmed from the state of many of the items. Blue Ketter had
not been exaggerating when he’d said that Piers’ things had been
‘torn up’. Some of them were in shreds. Much was blood-spattered,
although an effort had been made to clean the worst before packing
it. She fought down the nausea and regarded the ripped clothing,
the tattered notebooks, the slashed bedroll, and felt a total
incomprehension. Whatever could possibly have prompted such wanton
destruction?

She wanted to
put everything away, to forget. But her curiosity dominated.
Why?

There was
something odd about the destruction…

She sat back
on her heels and let her eyes rove over all the items in front of
her: clothes, surveying and mapping equipment, cooking utensils,
canvas tent, fly and ground sheet. Some things, like the loose
sheets of parchment, were untouched. Others, like the padding of
the bedroll, had been so thoroughly pulled apart that the only
possible reason there could have been to return them to Piers’
heirs was to show that they had not been stolen.

As her eyes
scanned the items, she began to see the pattern. Anything of
thickness had been ripped apart. A fur-lined leather doublet, the
heels to Piers’ boots, the collar and double yoke of his best
travelling shirt, the bedroll, the spines of his notebooks. Other
things had suffered too: the telescope had been wrenched from its
mounting on the theodolite, and then sliced open. The handle to the
cooking pot had been similarly opened up. Only Piers’ staff and his
wooden leg had been left untouched, presumably because it was
obvious that the former was a single piece of unjointed wood, and
because he had still been wearing the latter when he was
attacked.

She took up
the telescope and examined it, feeling herself riven through with
horror. She could not imagine what tool could have been used to do
such a thing: the thick brass body of the instrument had been
roughly cut in two lengthways. The edges were jaggedly scalloped
and sharp. Not a tool, of course. Unnaturally powerful claws…or
teeth.

A pet. Sweet
heaven.

But who would
order the destruction of a ’scope? A telescope was one of the most
valuable of all artefacts because the knowledge of how to grind the
lenses had been lost after the Rending. Piers’ instrument had been
passed from father to son through generations of mapmakers.
Possibly the body may have been renewed and the lenses realigned
several times, but there was little doubt that the lenses
themselves dated back to the days of the Old Margravate, to
Malinawar, before the world had been rent. They were priceless.

Piers’
murderers had been looking for something.

Something
small that could be hidden in the lining of a doublet or the spine
of a book. Or flat, so it could be folded up and put in the heel of
a boot, or rolled up to fit inside a pot handle or a telescope.
Precious stones? Money? A map? Yet mapmakers did not carry large
sums of money and valuables, nor did they secrete their maps away
from sight like hidden wealth. And what the murderers had been
looking for had to be something more precious than a telescope.
Still, if he did have something valuable, she knew exactly where he
would have put it, and it was apparently a place that the searchers
had not considered…

Reluctantly,
with a sense that she was somehow about to violate her father, she
reached out to take up the wooden leg. The padded cup made to hold
the stump of his amputation was cut from soft leather, which had
then been lined with flannel and stuffed in between with
tree-cotton. It was not the cup that interested Keris, however. She
took the leg across to the shop counter where she freed the several
linchpins that attached the cup to the lag-eye screws in the wood.
She held the peg up to the light and peered into its hollow
interior. There was money there as she had expected; but there was
something else as well. Gently she upended it and shook out its
contents into her other hand.

A rolled up
mapskin.

She knew
immediately it was not a Kaylen map; the skin was the wrong colour.
Carefully she unrolled it across the counter.

And stared.
And stared.

Nothing had
prepared her for this, nothing.

A trompleri
map.

Her first
thought was an incredulous—and joyous—So they exist! Then she felt
the hot stab of prickling fear. There was magic in such a map.

And lastly the
thought came, Perhaps there were those who would feel a trompleri
map was worth killing for…

~~~~~~~

And the map
the Maker gave to Knight Weddon was such that had never been seen
before. The mountains stood high before him and the Deep writhed
across the mapskin, showing its wickedness. Knight Weddon fled the
Minions, following the path the map showed him and was received
safely…

—Pilgrims VIII:
5: 42-44

Keris worked
hard on the charts. She’d decided thirty-five master charts were
needed that year and they were among the hardest she had ever had
to create, with more ley lines than usual and some odd
manifestations along the length of the Wanderer—the Bitch, as Piers
had always called it. In addition, his notes had been torn and
muddled out of sequence, so it was sometimes hard to tell which
figures corresponded to which ley lines. She worked fifteen hours a
day and even then had to skimp on the final artistic work of the
copies, which was a blow to her pride. She was only slightly
mollified to hear the copied maps praised by those who came in to
buy them. The buyers thought Thirl had drawn them, of course, and
it rankled to hear him praised when all he had done was the
tracings and repetitive work. It hurt too, to have to send out most
of the maps uncoloured. Without Piers to help and with so much more
to do than usual, there simply was not time to include the extras
that had made her work special in the past.

She laboured
in the kitchen where her mother now slept, out of sight of the
customers, keeping her mother company and trying not to see how
fast Sheyli’s health was deteriorating, trying not to hear her
restless tossing and moaning. The household chores and much of the
nursing were now given over to Mistress Pottle. Even Thirl had been
forced to acknowledge Keris could not manage the house as well as
the map-making, and he’d been willing enough to pay Mistress Pottle
to work double her normal number of hours.

He himself
went to the tavern in Upper Kibbleberry rather less and spent most
of his time working on the copies in the shop or serving behind the
counter. He raised the price of all maps of the Unstable, an action
which drew instant protest from his Unstabler customers. As much as
they grumbled, in the end they paid up. No one else in the First
Stability sold such good charts, and to try to cross the Unstable
without the benefit of the latest maps would have been foolhardy
for even the best of guides.

While she
worked at the main table in the kitchen, Keris propped the door
between the room and the shop ajar so that she could listen to what
the customers had to say. It annoyed her that Thirl was not
interested in the stories people had to tell of their crossings;
too often he would cut short a tale of adversity or adventure with
a curt, ‘Well, which map is it that you’re wanting then?’

Once, when
Yerrie came tearing into the kitchen in total panic, she heard the
gravelly tones of the man with the obsidian eyes as he bought a
sequence of maps, asking for coloured ones. Thirl, impatient with
his request, answered him rudely. The man insisted, his tone
steely, and Thirl offered him the master charts at an outrageous
price. Keris gritted her teeth to stop her protest. Piers had never
sold master charts.

Protracted
haggling finally resulted in a price they both agreed on, after
which Thirl brusquely added there’d be no more updated maps from
the workrooms of Piers Kaylen next season. The man said, ‘I’m not
surprised. I had heard Piers had died and I have also heard that
Thirl Kaylen couldn’t match his sire.’ The words were said politely
enough, but Keris had the feeling that the man knew perfectly well
he was talking to Piers’ son. She suspected the remark was made to
exact revenge for Thirl’s manner and his exorbitant prices.

Keris almost
heard Thirl bristle. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked. But the man
gave only a noncommittal answer, and Thirl, when he came through
into the main room afterwards, looked strangely disconcerted.
Master obsidian-eyes has that effect on people, it seems, Keris
thought, wryly amused.

‘Creation,’
said Mistress Pottle, who had also heard the exchange, ‘that one’s
got a voice like a mountain on the move. I wouldn’t like to cross
by him on a dark night.’

Harin Markle
came several times in the evenings, ostensibly to see Thirl, more
covertly to court her. He made a poor job of it. Lacking in
imagination, he was puzzled by the absence of any enthusiasm for
marriage on her part, unable to accept that she was simply not
interested. He’d decided her indifference was all an act. Such a
plain girl, he thought, must want to marry him and she was
therefore playing hard to get. She found his dogged attentions, so
obviously inspired by greed rather than passion, both ludicrous and
insulting.

Thirl merely
shrugged in a disinterested fashion when he saw she was not going
to encourage his friend. ‘You always were too stubborn for your own
good,’ he remarked.

She knew he
was continuing with his plans for the tavern. Mistress Pottle told
her he had ordered chairs and tables from the carpenter in the
village. The blacksmith’s wife, dropping in with some mutton-brain
jelly one day, said that she’d heard Thirl had made a large order
of wine from the vintner’s up near Kt Weddon’s, and Keris herself
overheard Thirl talking to the brewer’s man from Beckle East about
ale and beer, and to Harin about purchasing some mead from Middle
Kt Beogor.

She didn’t ask
where Thirl was getting the money from to make the orders; she
knew. He was raiding the coins behind the lose brick at the back of
the sink; pipeweed money, Piers had called it, meaning money to buy
the luxuries and necessities of his old age once he could no longer
work—things like the smoking herbs for his pipe, which were
imported from the Eighth Stability.

Thirl’s buying
spree upset her. The few gold coins would not last long, and after
they were gone, there would only be her dowry money. According to
the Rule, all the money was now legally Thirl’s as long as he
undertook to look after his mother until her death, and his sister
until she married. In fact, provided she was cared for, an
unmarried woman had no rights to property unless her living male
relatives—and the Rule Office—sanctioned the ownership. Keris had
heard the village devotions-chantor, Nebuthnar, pontificate on the
reasons for such laws. ‘This Rule is designed to protect the
interests of the weaker members of our community, the children and
husbandless women,’ he’d said.

‘Who says such
women are weaker?’ she’d asked cheekily. She’d been about fourteen
at the time. ‘All the oldest people in the village are women.’

He’d not been
able to give an answer that satisfied her. His spluttered, ‘The
Rule brings Order and should therefore not be questioned,’ was
hardly an adequate explanation. Order, all important Order.
Regularity was paramount, change was anathema. Order ruled, and the
Rule brought Order. What nobody mentioned was that the Rule
stifled, that Order suffocated.

She and
Chantor Nebuthnar, a pompous man who spluttered saliva everywhere
when he talked, were old enemies. Sheyli had once remarked that a
place the size of Kibbleberry was not thought to merit a chantor of
quality. Certainly Chantor Nebuthnar lacked learning, just as he
lacked humility and half a dozen other virtues normally considered
desirable in a chantor. What he did not lack was belief in the
necessity of obedience to the Rule and a forthright officiousness
in applying the law. Not only was he responsible for seeing that
the Rule was obeyed, but he performed the duties of a
mentor-chantor as well, which meant Keris had been in his winter
reading classes as a child. She’d stuck it out for four years, by
which time she could read and figure as well as he could.

It did not
help that he had an innate distrust of all the Kaylen family
because Piers worked the Unstable, and in Nebuthnar’s rather simple
mind, Unstablers were suspect. Mapmakers and such lived outside of
the Rule for the greater part of a year, after all. He kept a close
watch on the Kaylens and pounced every time one of them made a
mistake. He complained when Piers did not wear regulation clothing,
fined Keris once when he caught her wearing trousers to ride
Ygraine, railed against Thirl when he was caught climbing down from
Mistress Verlan’s window when Master Verlan was away—all
transgressions against Order.

Still, Keris
now appreciated his visits to her mother, to offer her solace and
the usual homilies to the dying. Sheyli needed the comfort of
religion and he seemed able to offer her hope for an afterlife,
which was more than all his teachings in winter school had done for
Keris herself. She might have thought better of him, if he had not
sought her out following one of these visits to ask her what
thought she had given to marriage.

She gave him a
level look. ‘My mother lies mortally sick, and you ask me such a
question?’