Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (29 page)

Nell leaped over the wagon box and hurled herself under the tent. I climbed after her as fast as I could. At the back of the wagon, my father held a knife at the throat of the sleeping old man. Perhaps the attack had made him reconsider, or Nell had. But he had decided not to wait for Hygryll. Before Nell could reach him, Rawley slashed the blade across Harbinger’s wattled neck.

No blood. No cut. The knife might as well have been made of air.

Both Rawley and Nell stared. Rawley turned pale as the sun-bleached canvas above him. Nell shuddered and whispered, ‘So they have succeeded.’ And a moment later, ‘See what you
hisafs
have done?’

My father rallied. ‘
We
have not done this, woman. Don’t be so stupid.’

‘It is you who are stupid, all of you men who think that killing can mend what killing has created. If your son had not brought the Dead back to the land of the living, the web of being would not be so strained. If you had not created those dogs, crossing into beings that have their own separate nature, the web of being would not be so strained. If you
hisafs
could not cross bodily now into the Country of the Dead – and that, too, is Roger’s doing – the web of being would not be so strained.’

He turned to face her, the knife still in his hand, and at his look I shrank back. He said, ‘There is no “web”. That is a notion you women of the soul arts have constructed in your mind. We
hisafs
know better. We know there is a wall between the countries of the living and the Dead, a barrier, because we – and only we! – have crossed it.
Your knowledge is all conjecture, while ours comes from experience. That wall has been breached, and the only way to prevent further destruction of it is to kill the destroyers. Before all of them become like him!’ Again my father pointed his knife at the sleeping Harbinger.

‘And I can see how successful your effort to kill him was.’ Nell’s voice dripped sarcasm.

‘It will be.’

‘How?’

He didn’t answer, but she must have known more of his thinking than I did because she said, ‘You cannot do that. We will not let you.’

My father hurled the knife to the wagon bed, where it stuck in the wood, vibrating. ‘You will not “let” me! How will you stop me? Become snakes again and poison me? And perhaps Roger as well? Why not Rawnie, too? She has no talent for soul arts, so perhaps she will grow up to champion the
hisaf
cause! Why not eliminate that threat now, you who claim to abhor killing but who just slew a small army of Soulviners?’

‘It was necessary,’ Nell said. The skin at the hollow of her throat beat hard and fast. She was controlling herself only by an enormous effort of will, and Rawley fought to do the same.

‘So the killing you deem necessary does not affect your “web”, but killing by
hisafs
will destroy it. Very logical.’

‘I did not say that. Of course we have strained the web, you half-wit! But nothing compared to what you will do if you carry out this insane plan! Was it not enough that Roger here nearly tore the whole web by killing Katharine? Twice?’

‘And yet your web seems to continue,’ my father said. He had winced at the sound of my sister’s name, and the wince seemed to further enrage him.

Nell’s hands clenched into fists. ‘You understand
nothing! Can you not suspend your own idea of a “wall” for long enough to see the larger truth?’

‘Can you not suspend yours long enough to see the truth of actual experience?’

Their eyes locked and they glared at each other, both their hands curled into fists. Web, wall – was this then a battle of images? Or of men’s gifts against the talents of women? And I – I did not know what I believed. Both seemed to be right, to me, and both filled me with dread.

I said to Rawley, ‘What is it you are going to do in Hygryll that she objects to so much?’

Slowly both their heads turned towards me. Evidently they had forgotten I was there. Beneath them the old man slept on, his drugged breath turning musky in the close air. His flesh had gone even slacker, as people’s do in sleep, and blue veins traced patterns across the wrinkles of his eyelids.

‘Rawley,’ I repeated, refusing to call him ‘Father’, ‘how are you planning to kill someone who cannot be murdered?’

Perhaps Nell scented an ally. She said, ‘Your father has a desperate idea, Roger. Desperate and dangerous and stupid. He knows now that he cannot kill Harbinger himself, neither in this realm nor that other. He has not the power. But he believes that others might. That those in Hygryll, the Soulviners most advanced in their obscene quest and so close to reaching immortality themselves, can still kill each other and perhaps Harbinger too. In other words: the only thing which can destroy power is more power. It is the sort of thinking that has brought us to this pass in the first place!’

My mind struggled to keep up, to sort this into sense. ‘And … and is it true? Can others in Hygryll kill this old man?’

Nell was silent.

‘You see,’ my father said, ‘she doesn’t know. The truth is that no one knows until it is tried. But it is our best hope.’

Nell said despairingly, ‘It may destroy us all. It—’

‘Now you say “may”! A moment ago it was “will destroy us all”!’

Nell ignored him, speaking directly to me. ‘We do not
know
. There is no precedent for any of this – how could there be? But consider, Roger. When you threw your sister into the vortex of watchers from Soulvine, we expected her power to be dispersed among the watchers. It was not – she entered one of the unnatural dogs. When she was killed by … by that stray moor cur in the pit at Galtryf, we expected her vanished power to tear the web of being. Instead, it was dispersed among the Soulviners there, because they had learned to absorb it. They have also learned to drain babes of their
vivia
, using it to balance that taken from circles of the Dead. We did not expect that, either. But in each of these instances, the balance has been maintained, the flow of power between the land of the living and the Country of the Dead. What Rawley proposes will completely upset that balance. Where will the immense, dark power of soul around Harbinger go? It cannot go into any of us – power cannot be transferred among living men and women. Think, Roger, where will it
go
? And what will that do to the web of being?’

‘This is all nonsense,’ Rawley said. ‘No more substantial than the light from marsh gas. We kill the enemy, they relapse into mindless tranquillity on the other side, and their “power” is gone. We are safe from them. It is my duty to protect The Queendom and the Unclaimed Lands, and I will do whatever is necessary to safeguard both.’

In my mind I heard Queen Caroline, three years ago, say the same thing: ‘
I will do whatever is necessary to rule my
queendom well, for the greater good
.’ Perhaps all in command had this same rigid determination, or they would not be in command. Certainly at this moment Nell’s face and Rawley’s resembled each other, both harsh masks of complete certainty.

Only I felt swamped by doubt.

I said to my father, ‘But how will you persuade the Soulviners of Hygryll to kill Harbinger? He is their leader, and they are warriors. Won’t they die themselves before murdering him?’

Silence. Then Nell said spitefully, ‘Tell him, Rawley.’

My father gazed at me with no lessening of harshness. He said, ‘People will do anything under torture, Roger.’

‘You would torture people?’

Nell said, ‘And if that does not work – and I think it will not – he and his
hisafs
will torture their children in front of them, until they trade Harbinger’s life for their children’s lives.’

I don’t know what expression lay on my face. Whatever it was, it caused my father to burst out, ‘Do not be so soft, Roger! The Brotherhood and Soulvine Moor have destroyed our children, have they not? You have witnessed it! This is war!’

Nell said, ‘And you are but a warrior, Rawley. You are not the sword. Do not overreach yourself and so destroy us all!’

‘I am trying to save us all! Even as you women, our supposed allies, thwart my efforts!’

I could stand it no longer. I stumbled from the wagon and sank to the ground beside one of the wheels. I think that if Nell or Rawley had come after me, I would have knifed either one. They did not follow me.

This, then, was the ruthlessness I had seen in my father’s eyes, and the gloss of insanity upon that ruthlessness. Would my father really carry out his monstrous
plan? To torture children to manipulate their parents … even the parents of Soulvine Moor. To do so in order to force them to kill Harbinger, without even knowing for certain if it was possible, or what the consequences might be.

And what lengths would Nell and her web women, who were equally determined, go to in order to stop him?

If Nell killed my father, his men would complete the plan anyway. Other
hisafs
, Rawnie said, had been coming and going to ‘Papa’ ever since he left Galtryf, spreading Rawley’s orders throughout three countries and two realms with the spoken ‘command word of the day’. No, killing Rawley would not stop his terrible plan. Nell must know that. As must Mother Chilton, far away in the capital and directing operations of her own.

The web of being. I did not know if it was, as Rawley said, just a notion. Mother Chilton had spoken of it, but Mother Chilton, too, had been wrong on occasion.

A sound reached me then. Not Rawley and Nell, still arguing within the wagon. Not Charlotte nor Maggie nor Rawnie, picking bilberries out of earshot. Not the sudden cry of a brace of grouse, startled out of the heather and rising nearly straight up into the grey sky. No, what I heard was dogs, baying to each other. Then I could see them, dogs grey as the sky, barrelling across the moor. Before I could even react, they were upon me. They carried
hisafs
. Not the hisafs of the Brotherhood, for the dogs did not attack. They leaped gracefully onto the box of the wagon and then went inside, three of them.
Hisafs
sent to protect Rawley against Soulvine Moor. Or against the web women. Or both.

Rawnie, attracted by the arrival of the dogs, dropped her bilberries and raced towards the wagon. I turned
away from her. Instead I stared at the wagon wheel beside me. It had slipped into a small patch of bog and was slowly sinking, deeper and deeper into the mire.

We dismantled the wagon, which could not be pried from the bog. There was no horse to pull it anyway. From the wood of the wagon sides and the cloth of the tent we made a kind of litter, and dumped the old man on it. Rawley and I carried this between us. It was not heavy, the old man being little more than bones and beard, and I had but one hand. Still, I managed with Charlotte and Maggie’s help. Rawnie walked beside us, along with the three dogs. Nell and her web women had all disappeared.

Gone ahead, in their soul-sharing guises, to arrive at Hygryll first? Why?

Even Rawnie spoke little. That might have been due to orders from her father, the only one capable of controlling her. Or perhaps she had finally, in Rawley’s presence, let go of her noisy bravado and become what would be natural: a frightened little girl.

Clouds had blown in from the west, threatening rain. We picked our way carefully across the low-lying areas, keeping to the higher ground and away from the greener patches of mire. These grew fewer. The ground rose steadily towards the Unclaimed Lands and the soil must have improved because now heather carpeted everything with tough-stemmed purple flowers that were pretty to look at but difficult to travel through. The occasional tree appeared, pine or stunted birch.

My father drove us onward until Maggie rebelled. ‘Rawley, we must stop. Roger must rest!’

He glanced back at me. ‘He looks stout enough still.’

‘I am,’ I said shortly, angry at Maggie for treating me like an invalid and determined to show no weakness in
front of my father. And in truth I did feel stronger than expected, although my shoulder ached from carrying my half of the litter.

‘Well, then,
I
am tired,’ Maggie said, and sat down on a tussock covered with coarse grass. She looked meaningfully at Charlotte, who stood irresolute. Charlotte looked exhausted, probably as much with worry as with walking, but she would never defy Rawley. Had my mother been the same, so soft and pliant? From what I remembered of her, yes.

Rawley said, ‘Oh, all right. Charlotte, can you give us something to eat?’

She had food in her pack. We laid the litter upon the ground and the five of us ate on the wide, empty moor, the dogs waiting hopefully for scraps. It was eerie to sit there, eating, as if on some macabre picnic. At our feet lay the old man who was – perhaps – immortal. My father contemplated the most monstrous crime I could imagine. Dogs that were not dogs watched us from green eyes. Grey clouds blew over the moor, but the real storm was within me.

When Maggie, Charlotte, and Rawnie all went behind a clump of gorse to relieve their bladders, I faced my father yet again.

‘Why Hygryll?’

This time he answered me. His eyes hardened. I would not see any more complex, vulnerable expressions on that stern face. He said, ‘We already hold the village. The inhabitants are already our prisoners.’

‘So I guessed, or you would not be headed there with nothing to defend us but three dogs. I meant, why did Soulvine Moor choose that remote place for the first man to capture life everlasting?’

‘They did not choose it. It chose them. And I think you already know why.’

‘Because my sister was born there. Or rather, almost born there.’

‘Yes,’ my father said, and for a moment pain broke through on his rigid face. ‘The bastard who abducted your mother took her there. She—’ He broke off, shook his head, and looked away.

So it had been an abduction, my mother’s second man, not a marriage. And my father had not known until it was too late. Where had I been? Perhaps already sent to my Aunt Jo. Abruptly I did not want to know more of my parents’ history. Not now. Not ever. There is a limit to what the heart can bear.

Instead I said, ‘Are you really going to do this thing, Rawley?’