Isles of the Forsaken (22 page)

“I think no one seeks a soulstone without some reason,” Spaeth said. She had begun to wonder why the conversation had taken this turn.

“Do you mean to say you have none for yourself?” Anit chided her. “Just like my daughter. Young folk!”

“You’re a fine one to talk!” The slight sharpness in Lorin’s tone betrayed how much the topic pained her. “You just admitted you only found yours the other day. Where was your great foresight when you were our age?”

“I was never a young woman facing childbirth. Nor a dhotamar in such dangerous times as these. When I was young, the ills we faced were like ripples in your teacup: a barren ewe, a sickly child, a marriage in need of mending. In those days, women did not die of childbed fever, and people did not seek out dhotamars to set the whole world on its hinges again.”

Anit’s eyes and Spaeth’s met across the table, and she had an intuition that he was trying to send her a message. She wanted to speak with him in private.

They had to wait until Tway and Lorin had cleared away the breakfast dishes and gone together out into the yard to wash them. Spaeth helped Anit back into his chair. She could not help noticing that his arms were a patchwork of scars, just like Goth’s. The sight made her feel restless. It was like looking at her own future. She became aware that the bandage on her own arm was itching, so she began to take it off. Anit watched silently till she tossed the bandage into the fire; then he said quietly, “What happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“You have the scar,” he said, “but you have not given dhota. How can that be?”

“There was an Inning,” she said. “He stopped me before I could finish.”

Anit winced at the thought. “That is cruel,” he said.

“No,” she said. “He was right. If I had finished, I would be in bondage today. I should have been grateful to him.”

Anit was silent, looking at her hands. Self-consciously, she crossed her arms to hide her darkened nails.

“It is a dangerous risk you are taking, resisting dhota,” Anit said. “No Inning can save you from the Black Mask.”

He delivered the fatal diagnosis so gently, it barely seemed real. “So it’s true,” she said. “There really is such a thing.”

“Did you doubt it?” Anit said.

“I thought they were telling me tales to scare me into doing as they wished.”

Slowly, Anit shook his head. “It is no tale. It starts in the fingertips and toes. If nothing is done, they will eventually decay and dissolve. But long before that happens, the disease flows inward and wakes a hunger, but not a healthy one like dhota. Nothing can satisfy it. In such a state of unmet longing, a Grey Person is terribly vulnerable, and can easily become a tool of the powers of unbalance.”

Spaeth hugged her arms to herself.

“But there is a simple cure,” he said.

Bitterly, she said, “Dhota?”

“Yes. You must give yourself to someone. Soon.”

Restlessly, she looked around the room, as if to find some escape. “All I want is to be free, like I used to be,” she said.

Anit shook his head. “There is no freedom, by any route. Not for us. Except one way.”

“What way?”

Anit pointed a trembling finger at his own chest. “Inside us, in our hearts. If we choose to do what we will be compelled to do anyway, then that is freedom.”

“No, it’s not. It’s giving in.”

He smiled sadly. “You won’t say that once you have done it.”

For a long time Spaeth was silent, thinking. At last, hesitantly, she said, “Anit, if you knew there was someone who had become a tool of the Mundua and Ashwin, but you didn’t know who it was, what would you do?”

The bonecrafter had a look of grave dismay. “Such a person must be hunted down,” he said. “Hunted down, destroyed, or cured at the cost of another life.”

“But how?”

“That is why we have an Heir of Gilgen.”

“Who
is
the Heir of Gilgen?”

“Today? I do not know. Years ago, it was Onan Listor. He had a son, Goran. If Goran is still alive today, he would be the Heir. But where he is, I have no idea.”

A prisoner, Ridwit had said. “I have to find him,” Spaeth said softly. “I need to warn him.”

“You know this thing surely?” Anit said, frowning.

“Yes. I don’t want to know. I don’t know what to do.”

Anit paused, thinking. “You have brought a world of troubles to my doorstep,” he said. “I know nothing about the balances. You speak of powers I have never encountered.”

“Then who can I ask?” she said, a little desperately.

“We live in a world where the great leaders have abandoned us. Perhaps in such an age, ordinary people must do what the great did in former times.”

“Not me!” Spaeth said. “I’m less than ordinary.”

“Perhaps,” said Anit, “you are like one of those sticks of driftwood, incomplete without the other part. Find your bandhota, and you will find your true shape. It is the only answer I can give you.”

*

It was not until Nathaway stepped onto the dock in Harbourdown that he realized he had no real plan for finding Harg and Spaeth. It was a smallish town, but a town nevertheless, with a thousand places for people to disappear.

As he circled the crowded market square opposite the wharf, trying to get his bearings, he composed in his mind how he would describe the exotic scene to Rachel. It was a raucous bazaar where broad-faced shopkeepers flaunted finery and foods set out on unsanitary open counters. Colourful homespun awnings flapped in the sea breeze, and a cacophony of wind chimes jangled everywhere he turned.

At last he spotted an island of order: a tall stone building with “customs house” inscribed over the lintel. Relieved to find an Inning authority to appeal to, he sprinted up the steps and entered.

Inside, the building was a mayhem of construction. Workmen swarmed everywhere; the hall was nearly blocked with piles of lumber, bricks, and unmixed plaster. Nathaway picked his way in and peered into the first room he came to. A line of Torna clerks sat working, their desks all shoved over to one side while painters worked on a wall. There was an Inning overseer in charge; with a feeling of relief, Nathaway said to him, “Excuse me, could you direct me to the person in charge?”

“Who are you?” the man said, frowning. When Nathaway gave his name, the man eyed him suspiciously, but only said, “Proctor Fullabeau is in the back.”

Dodging plasterers, Nathaway picked his way down the hall to the back room. Here, a tall, cultured Inning with an erect, almost military bearing, was berating a foreman over some deviation from a set of plans. Nathaway waited patiently until they had hashed out the problem, when Proctor Fullabeau turned and surveyed him with autocratic disdain.

“And you would be . . .?” was all Fullabeau said.

When Nathaway gave his name again, he felt the same chill of scepticism. Fullabeau said, “You are supposed to be on Yora.”

Startled that the official, whom he had never met, knew about his assignment, Nathaway said, “I . . . I know. I’m looking for two Yorans who came here in the past two days. It’s important that I find them.”

“Has there been an infringement of the law?”

“Oh, no. Not by them, at any rate.”

“The islanders are free to move about, you know,” the proctor said. “We can’t exactly stop them.”

“I know that. But I’m concerned for the woman’s safety. She’s—well, she’s Lashnura.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?”

Nathaway was taken aback by the man’s attitude. From a fellow Inning, out here where there were so few of them, he had expected camaraderie, cooperation, even fellowship. Not this frosty obstructionism. He said, “I thought perhaps you might have some knowledge of the people under your authority, and be able to tell me where to look.”

Fullabeau reacted to this as if it were a sword-thrust of criticism. “Look,” he said, “I’ve got seven or eight thousand uncounted, undocumented, unwashed natives out there, and the only difference between them is that some wait till our backs are turned to break the law, while the others do it in front of our faces. I don’t yet have enough men or arms to police them, and barely enough to keep them from outright rebellion. So when you come to me looking for one of their ritual prostitutes—”

“She’s not that!” Nathaway blurted out. Fullabeau paused in mid-rant, and Nathaway felt his face going red. Then he blushed because he was blushing.

“You did say she was Lashnura,” Fullabeau said, scrutinizing him.

“I know. It’s just that . . . you see, I’m trying to protect her.”

Fullabeau gave a slight sigh. “Very well. I’ll have the patrols keep an eye out for her. It’s all I can do. In the meantime, I advise you not to walk the streets unescorted. It’s simply not safe.”

“What
should
I do?” Nathaway said. It wasn’t as if he could hire bodyguards, or stay hidden in a hotel.

“Go back to Yora,” Fullabeau said. “If I find her I’ll send word.”

Thoroughly nettled by this brush-off, Nathaway managed to force out a semi-civil “Thank you” before he turned and left.

Outside, he stood on the steps of the customs house till his temper cooled so that he could think of what to do next. It was clear that if he were going to find Spaeth, he would have to do it on his own. Grimly determined, he set out across the square, determined to canvass every street if that was what it took.

The streets around the square had a prosperous, mercantile character, and he guessed that this was the Torna neighbourhood, an unlikely place to search for two Adaina refugees. So he headed uphill, where the buildings were older and more dilapidated. He walked randomly, searching for some clue, indifferent to every face but one: a haunting, grey face with mother-of-pearl eyes.

And then he saw a face from Yora. Not her, but Strobe’s blowzy daughter, who had no conceivable business here in Harbourdown unless she was somehow complicit in the whole affair. She was walking purposefully downhill, and did not see Nathaway, so he followed her at a distance.

She headed toward a poor section near the harbour. He tracked her through crowded, winding alleys. Though he was several lengths behind, his head rose above the stocky Adainas around him, making it easy to spot her. At last she flitted through the green door of a grimy, ill-kept tavern. Arriving moments later, Nathaway ducked his head under the low lintel. A burly man just inside the door lurched to his feet, but Nathaway paid him no heed, and barrelled on into the room.

A crowd of men was gathered around a table, listening intently. On one end of the table was a heap of antique firearms. But none of this registered as it should have. All Nathaway saw was that the man speaking to them was Harg Ismol.

“Harg!” he said, terribly pleased to have found him.

Harg looked up, and a shock of recognition crossed his face; then his eyes shifted to something behind Nathaway, and he shouted, “No! Don’t hurt him!” just as something came smashing down on Nathaway’s skull from behind, and the world exploded into fiery splinters. The floor crashed into his face.

There was a crowd. Noise. Men arguing. Harg kneeling over him, saying, “He’s worth his weight in gold alive.” Then Nathaway was fleetingly aware of being carried up some stairs. He was lying on his back when an overwhelming urge to vomit woke him, and he struggled to turn over, to get up, then threw up violently on the floor. His head hurt ferociously, and he groaned.

“Go fetch him, Calpe,” Harg said.

When Nathaway next drifted into consciousness, his stomach was in spasms again, and he retched till his muscles ached without anything but bile coming up.

An old man with a soothing manner sat down on the bed beside him, placing a hand on his sweaty forehead. There was something cool and calming about his touch, and Nathaway relaxed, feeling he was in competent hands.

“Yes,” the old man said, “I can help him, if he is willing. It’s a nasty blow, but not mortal.”

Harg was hovering beside the bed, looking down at Nathaway in an agony of anxiety. “I can’t risk him dying again,” he said. “Did you bring the knife and bowl?”

Only then did Nathaway realize that the old man touching him was grey-skinned, and they were about to perform one of their barbarous healing rites on him.

“No,” he said weakly. Then, summoning all his resolve, “No!”

The old man said to him gently, “I can take away the pain.”

There was nothing Nathaway wanted more than to be rid of this skull-splitting pain. But not at this price. “No,” he said.

“Please. I want to,” the Grey Man said.

“No,” Nathaway repeated, then sank into oblivion.

The gaily dressed picnickers who gathered on the windswept hill above Harbourdown’s Redoubt were in high spirits as they spread their blankets on the grass. They had collected gradually, having climbed the hill in little groups, lugging their wicker hampers of food, with their catball rackets on their shoulders in canvas bags. There were about forty of them, thirty men and ten women—enough to make up two catball teams with a few left over to cheer and run after the ball when it went out of bounds. The level parade ground behind the fort made a perfect playing field, while the hill behind it formed a natural amphitheatre for viewers to sit and watch.

Harg sat in the grass watching, with his three team leaders—Calpe, Cobb, and Birk—on either side. He felt itchily nervous. It had all been thrown together so fast, with no time for training or dry runs, and it was a plan that depended entirely on timing. If they struck too early, the approaching warships would be tipped off and would never fall into the trap. Strike too late, and there would not be enough time to carry out the plan. He listened over the shouts of the catball players, hoping not to hear the signal from the lookout they had posted on the north shore of the island. Two shots in quick succession would mean the ships had been sighted. He didn’t want it to happen till after noon.

On the field below, the play was vigorous and the wind was brisk, a combination that often sent the ball out of bounds. At last, as one team made a particularly daring goal attempt, the catball went flying out of control right over the walls of the fort and into the enclosure beyond. A groan went up from the onlookers.