Angel Isle

CHAPTER

14

Once again, day followed day and week followed week as they had on the way south. The season changed as the world started to tilt toward winter. And it seemed to change faster than it would have if they had been staying in one place instead of traveling north, away from the sun. The grapes had already been beginning to ripen on the vines around Farfar. Now the vineyards were rare, and cattle grazed in kempt pastures, and the streams and rivers they crossed were already, to Ribek’s delight, beginning to foam and roar as the autumn rains that had fallen on the inland hills flooded back toward the ocean. Though they were still far south of the Valley, Maja began to sense, as she lay in the dark at the way stations, that she could smell the mountains.

Vaguely she wondered what was happening there. Had the horsemen burnt or smashed or killed or stolen everything they could find and then melted away through the northern passes? Had the people of the Valley driven them off? No knowing. She realized she was strangely uninterested. She had never been happy in the Valley. Almost the only happiness she had known in her life had been on this journey, despite all its terrors and hardships. The reason the Valley mattered to her was that one day she was going to live there with Ribek, in peace at Northbeck mill. That made it worth saving. Apart from that, she would almost have liked the journey to last for ever.

But Saranja boiled with impatience to press forward and her mood infected them all. They were reluctant to leave Striclan behind, but there was no way his mule could have kept up if Benayu hadn’t endowed it with extra speed and energy, just as Chanad had done for the horses. It must have been almost as ingratiating an animal as Striclan was a person, for it soon struck up an unlikely friendship with Pogo, which seemed to have a calming effect on him.

The pattern of their lives changed in other, less tangible ways. They had become more unsettled, less easy with each other. Even when Benayu had been at his most moody and difficult there had from the start been a unity of purpose between the four of them, an immediate friendship, though they had been strangers to each other only a few days earlier. This did not now sit so easily around them.

At first Maja thought it was something to do with Striclan. Not with the traveling scholar they had met after their encounter with the demon north of Larg—they had all liked him then. Saranja had actually said so. They no longer had to pretend they didn’t know he was a Sheep-face spy, and that should have made things easier, but it didn’t seem to. He still didn’t share their purpose. He didn’t even know about it. The barrier of secrecy and deceit had altered, but it was still there.

Later she decided that there was more to it than that, and they would have changed anyway. Maja herself was certainly changing, since Saranja had told her who her father was. It was surprisingly difficult to get used to the idea that everything wasn’t her fault. That had been such a habit of thought she couldn’t suddenly start thinking differently. She ought to have felt newborn, freed from the mysterious prison of guilt and shame, ready to start her life all over afresh, with Woodbourne only a hazily remembered dream, but she didn’t. There was old Maja and there was new Maja, and one was the shadow of the other, but which was which? They kept switching places, and this made her moody and jumpy in ways that she hadn’t been before.

Benayu had changed even more. They were all aware of it to some extent. To Ribek and Saranja there probably seemed now to be two Benayus. One was the boyish, confident young magician, delighting in his own powers, whom they had first met with Fodaro on that mountain pasture. In this mood some evenings he would chat happily about magic to Striclan, to Saranja’s undisguised irritation, while Striclan filled page after page of his notebooks in his private unreadable code. It was mainly gossip and anecdote, and always couched in the language of levels and powers—no hint of Fodaro’s equations, or the possibility of other dimensions, other universes.

The other Benayu was a brooding presence, riding or walking or staring into the fire of an evening in day-long silence. Over the long weeks of their journey the anguished, passionate lad who had sworn his oath with them to destroy the Watchers and avenge Fodaro’s death, the terrified boy who had cringed before the Watcher in the way station, had recovered his poise and purpose. Saranja no longer nannied him and ordered him about. They all respected these silences and withdrawals as part of that purpose, strengthening exercises, as he continued to absorb into himself and come to terms with the enormous powers he had inherited from Zara on the hill above Larg.

Ribek and Saranja also knew this was what was happening because Zara had told them it would. But Maja, through her extra sense, could feel it to be so, and realize that it was more than that. For her, sometimes, they had a stranger sitting with them in the evenings, breathing the air they breathed, eating the meal that Striclan had prepared, but only partly human. This was the third Benayu. It was something she had first sensed soon after they had left the desert north of Larg. It had been half dormant then, waiting until he was ready to receive it, but it was now fully active in him, wholly absorbed, as much a necessary part of his spiritual self as his liver or his spine were parts of his body. She couldn’t observe or examine it because it was warded within and without, like Chanad’s tower. If it hadn’t been, she couldn’t have lived long in its presence. All that she could tell for sure was that it was there, and it hadn’t been before. Dimly, also, she could sense, as she had when she’d first been aware of its presence, that it wasn’t an inert thing, like an heirloom passed from Zara to Benayu on her deathbed. It was a living entity that had of its own will chosen to make the transfer, like an Imperial messenger leaving an exhausted horse at a way station and taking a fresh mount for the next stage of his journey.

Ribek, of course, hadn’t changed at all. Maja couldn’t imagine him doing so. He was what he was and always would be. It was one of the things she loved him for. And Saranja was still very much herself only more so, her patience shorter, her temper trickier. She tended to pick on Striclan in particular, explosively condemning something he’d told them about the Pirates and having no patience with his explanations of the complex web of facts and motives that had brought it about. For her, anything the Pirates did was a thoroughly bad business, and that was that.

“They simply don’t think the same way,” Ribek said. “She’s got a black-or-white, all-or-nothing way of seeing things. He’s more of a shades-of-gray in-betweener. Me too.”

“I’m a don’t-knower, I suppose.”

“Problem. If you are, you can’t know you are.”

“Then I can’t know I can’t know.”

“You win.”

And Jex? How could you know whether he had changed, apart from growing steadily stronger? After they had eaten their midday meal Striclan would disappear to write up his report, so on fine days this allowed Jex to return to the form in which they had first seen him and bask, blinking in the sun, like any normal lizard. But he was reluctant to speak in their minds because doing so sent out a signal he was unable to reabsorb. It was very faint, but even so sufficiently different from other minor magics to attract the attention of anyone able to pick it up, supposing the Watchers were now actively hunting for creatures of his kind.

The way stations were full of whispered rumors about the Watchers. They had withdrawn from Tarshu and were preparing to defend Talagh with mighty feats of magic while the Pirates flooded inland. No, it was the Pirates who’d run away with their collective tail between their legs, while the Watchers were reestablishing their control over the Empire—why, hadn’t two of them appeared in the nick of time to deal with a gigantic hog-demon who was uprooting whole hillsides of the Stodz forest, first binding the creature in a lattice of woven lightning and then hurling it down into the innermost fires? In a west wind, the speaker said, you could still smell, as far off as Gast, the reek of roast crackling as it seeped through crevasses in the rock where the hills had closed back over the pit. No, said others, the Pirates had merely withdrawn and were regrouping out at sea beyond the reach of the Watchers’ magic, while the Watchers attempted to make contact with the mysterious powers of the ocean in the hope of forming an alliance. And so on.

Some of the rumors about demons Maja knew to be true, because she had several times sensed their curiously sickening magic somewhere in the distance. It was strange that none had manifested themselves nearer than a full day’s march. She wondered if they were somehow aware of what Saranja had done to the demon in the desert north of Larg, and were staying well away from her and Zald.

Not that the journey was without more ordinary dangers. Brigands abounded, mostly more sophisticated than the ones they had fought earlier. These set up roadblocks and claimed to be acting on the authority of the councilors in some nearby town. They demanded astounding levels of tax to pay for repairs and maintenance of order on the Highways, which they said was now the responsibility of the town in question. Highway users responded by openly carrying weapons and traveling in groups large enough to overwhelm any such gang, but this meant moving at the pace of the slowest. So Maja’s party pressed on, with Jex keeping Maja barely shielded, and her senses feeling ahead for the presence of ambush.

Twice that happened, and twice the Highway was openly barred. Each time Benayu flicked a screen around the area—he seemed now able to do this almost as easily as raising a hand to scratch his nose—and cast the bandits into a magical sleep, leaving them for the next party of travelers to find and despoil of their weapons and loot. Both times, Maja turned her attention south to where, she was sure, their true enemies were still searching for them. Perhaps it was this endlessly wearing attention forward and backward that hid from her something that had been quietly happening all the time since that first ambush.

It had been a long, hard day’s travel, across an endless-seeming plain, all boringly the same, with a scattering of hamlets among huge square fields almost ready for harvest but nothing as interesting as actual harvesters to look at. There’d been a nagging wind in their faces, carrying vicious little showers, the last of which had drenched them just before they reached the final way station. And then there’d been the hassle of getting their wet cloaks hung to dry in the inadequate space of their booth. Saranja for some reason had been unusually on edge all day, biting Ribek’s head off whenever he opened his mouth, almost, and now she was driven to fury by the way station ostler. Ostlers never did anything for the horses in their charge, other than allocate the stalls and take the fees and bribes, so on fine nights most travelers stabled their beasts in the open, but at times like this they could charge pretty well what they chose, and would insist that the stable was already full until they got what they wanted. Saranja knew from experience that there was no way round the system, and usually paid up grimly, but tonight she raged as if it had never happened to her before.

Her fury filled the booth. It was like Woodbourne on a bad day. Nobody, not even Striclan, dared say anything. She insisted on getting a fire going in the covered hearth in front of the booth but the wood was damp and at first wouldn’t do much more than smolder until Benayu woke up from his day-long trance and set it ablaze. They ate their supper late, and in silence. Maja must have fallen asleep halfway through.

She’d been trying to stay awake because it was her turn to help Striclan wash his cooking pots at the well. He insisted on doing most of that himself as he had a strange superstition about something he called bacteria, which he said lived in the tiniest scrap of rotten food and made you ill if you ate them. No one else came up to his standards of what counted as clean, but it still seemed unfair to leave it all to him. Then he’d go off to his booth to work on his notes and repair his kit and do his exercises and prepare for next day’s travel. At least, that was the reason he gave, but Ribek said it was mainly to leave them alone for a bit, in case they wanted to talk privately.

She woke with a start and pushed herself up, filled with guilt at having slept at all. How long? Somebody must have tucked her into her bedroll. The fire was mostly embers. By their faint light she could see Ribek and Benayu getting ready for bed.

“Wh…? Where…?” she mumbled.

“Saranja helped Striclan with his pots, and she’s staying on to help him with some stuff he’s writing about the desert magicians.”

“But it was my turn!”

“You’re too far gone to be any use. You’d have dropped things down the well.”

“Oh. All right. Tell her thank you.”

She flopped back down, but as she was about to plunge back into sleep a strangeness struck her. Almost before she’d woken she’d been aware that Striclan had left because she’d had no sense of his presence. But Saranja…Surely she’d felt her, still quite near…No, only part of her. Zald. Saranja wore the great jewel both night and day, and the quiet pulse of its many sleeping magics registered more strongly on Maja’s consciousness than Saranja’s own natural magic. For Maja, Zald had come to mean Saranja, and Zald was still near by, but Saranja wasn’t. She concentrated. The saddlebags. Zald was in the back of the booth, in one of Rocky’s saddlebags.

“She’s left Zald behind!”

Benayu chuckled.

“Has she, now? Has she, now?” said Ribek, sounding both surprised and amused.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Think it out. Or go to sleep. Anyway, it’s none of our business.”

She did her best, but sleep took her while she was sorting through as many as she could remember of Zald’s various jewels, trying to imagine which of them could possibly possess properties that prevented Saranja washing the pots right. The answer came to her in her sleep. She and Ribek were riding Levanter. She had her arms round Ribek’s waist and was leaning against his back. He seemed unusually hard and bony. She wriggled, trying to make herself more comfortable. Ribek glanced round, and it wasn’t Ribek at all. It was the imp from inside the demon-binder. The imp winked, as if sharing the joke that had amused Ribek and Benayu. And then she was standing in an empty street clutching Zald to her chest, still very hard and knobbly, and wondering hopelessly why Ribek had left her alone in a place like this.

Her unhappiness broke the dream and she woke knowing the answer. However useful Zald might be in other ways, you don’t want something like that in between you and the person you’re hugging. Yes, and the fire had been embers. It didn’t take that long to wash the pots and talk about a few magicians.

She lay in the dark listening to the rip and rattle of the wind and thinking, How strange. Saranja, of all people. Never in a million years would she have guessed that was going to happen. But Ribek knew already, and so did Benayu. And yet Ribek had been surprised that Saranja had left Zald behind. Had she done that before? No. Maja would have noticed, surely. So this was the first time they’d…That’s why Saranja had been in such a foul temper all day. Maja could understand that, though it wasn’t anything like what she felt about Ribek. But she’d always been a yielder and hider—that was how she’d survived—and for her, among other things, Ribek and his mill meant safety, protection, a place where she could stop hiding and be herself. Saranja wasn’t like that at all. She’d always been a battler, fighting her rough brothers as often as they’d fought each other, giving as good as she got.

That was why Zald suited her so, belonged with her as if it had been a suit of armor made for her, and now she’d made up her mind to take it off for Striclan. She said she hated men, and no wonder, seeing what had been done to her, but she’d put her hatred aside too, and was trusting herself to him, unarmored. So she’d been scared, and furious with herself for being scared.

And why hadn’t Maja felt that, for heaven’s sake? You’d have thought something like that…Or perhaps they weren’t actually in love, but were just taking the chance to give each other a good time, like Ribek and the jewel seller at Mord.

No. She’d have known about that, surely. It was the sort of thing she couldn’t help feeling, even if she didn’t want to pry. And it would have been part of Striclan’s outer self, which she could reach easily enough. But what he felt about Saranja took place in his hidden, inner self—the real Striclan. Yes, he loved her, and she loved him. How strange. How wonderful.

But…

But what did it mean for the rest of them, Ribek, Benayu, herself and Jex, and for their whole purpose in being here at all? Was Striclan one of them now? Could they trust him as much as they trusted Saranja?

Had trusted Saranja, was it now? What had she told him? Was it even possible (horrible thought!) Maja had been wrong about Striclan, and what he was hiding in his secret inner world wasn’t his love for Saranja at all, but that he was still really a spy who’d somehow tricked Saranja into falling in love with him so deeply that he could coax out of her everything she knew, all about the Ropemaker and the ring and Zara and Larg and Jex, and then betray them all to his Sheep-face masters?

She couldn’t believe it. But she wouldn’t have been able to believe that Saranja might fall in love with Striclan. And here, in the pit of the night, where it wasn’t only moon-shadows that took strange and frightening shapes, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Worrying whether it was true kept her awake for the rest of the night, or so it seemed, but in the end she was woken by sunlight full in her face, and immediately knew the whole thing was nonsense.

Nevertheless she asked Ribek about it later that morning, when they were riding well out of earshot behind the others. To her surprise he didn’t laugh at her.

“Yes, I’ve been wondering about it too,” he said. “Saranja? I don’t believe it. She’s got too much sense of her personal honor. She’s touchy enough about it for a whole fellowship of noble knights. She’d feel utterly guilty and ashamed if she’d been telling him anything. I know you try not to pry, but you’d be picking that up, surely.”

“I suppose so. I can tell she’s hiding something, but I don’t think she’s ashamed about it. Not that sort of ashamed, anyway. More like shy. Does she know we know?”

“I doubt it. He probably does. He’s very sharp about that sort of thing. Of course we can’t tell how much he’s picking up from her that she doesn’t realize she’s telling him, but however much in love she is she isn’t a fool. If she thought he was simply using her she’d be outraged.

“No, it isn’t really that I’ve been worrying about. It’s more what we’re going to do about him when we get to Barda. It’s only another few days now. Assuming that what we’re looking for—the Ropemaker’s physical being in some form or other—is actually there, and we don’t know that for sure, we’ve still got to find it, or do you think you’ll simply be able to sense where it is when you’re near enough?”

“I don’t know. He’s got to have hidden it so carefully. We’re going to have to use his hair again, like we did by the sheep-fold after we’d left Tarshu.”

“So that’s one great burst of magic. Do you think Jex is up to dealing with it yet? Can you ask him?”

“He can hear what we’re saying. He’ll probably tell me tonight. But last time it laid him out for weeks, though he’s a lot stronger now than he was then.”

“And if we’re on the right track that’s only going to be the beginning. There’s going to be another great burst when we find this thing, whatever it is, about as much as happened when we got Jex back, at a guess, and we went all the way down to Tarshu just to hide our doing that. There isn’t going to be anything to hide us this time. And then we’ve got to use it somehow. That’s three huge explosions of magic. Tarshu’s going to be small stuff beside it. And you’re going to have to stand it all.”

“I’ll manage. Don’t worry about me. The Watchers are going to be on to us almost at once, aren’t they? There’s no way Jex can screen all that.”

“I am worried about you. We all are. We worry about you every time we look at you. You’re skin and bone, almost, in spite of what Jex is doing to shield you, and your eyes are pits and you’re sleeping fifteen hours a day. The only good thing is that you eat like a lumberjack, but you’re still burning yourself up.”

“I’m all right. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

“I know you are, and I’m happy for you. But listen. Yes, you’re right about the Watchers. Anything we do has all got to happen extremely quickly, so that we can be away and out of this universe, whatever that means, before they catch up with us. We can’t take Striclan without him finding out all about other universes and so on, and we can’t just leave him behind at Barda because then the Watchers are going to get hold of him and squeeze everything they can out of him. He’s a tough little guy, but that’s not going to do him much good. Or us.

“I like Striclan. It isn’t only for Saranja’s sake that I don’t want anything like that to happen to him. But we’re talking about you, Maja. I don’t believe that even if Jex were fully fit, he’d be up to protecting you against this sort of magical cataclysm. It may very well knock us all out. I know I was pretty shaken by Tarshu, and again by what happened at the sheep-fold, and I know what that did to you. So if we can persuade Striclan to leave us I’d like you to go with him.”

“I can’t. You won’t find the Ropemaker without me.”

“You can’t be certain of something like that.”

“Yes I can. I just know. It’s what I’m here for.”

And if you’re going to be there, so am I.

Ribek started to say something and stopped. He sighed heavily, gazing down at his hands. It was strange to see him looking so unsure of himself.

“Let’s see what the others say,” she said.

“I doubt if Benayu will even hear me asking. He’s been in a complete dream these last few days, in another universe, almost. I suppose that might even be true.”

“He’s doing a lot of stuff inside himself. Getting ready for Barda, I think. Let’s see what Saranja says about Striclan.”

What Saranja said was, “I’ve already told him he can’t come. He wants to talk to you about it.”

“After supper tonight?”

“I’ll tell him.”

What Striclan said was, “Miss Saranja tells me that I cannot come to Barda with you. I have pleaded with her before now, but she has just told me that it is also your joint decision, made independently from her, and coincides with her wishes. So I am forced to accept it. But I have a favor to ask, nevertheless.

“She has told me nothing about your reasons for going to Barda, but I have deduced that what you are proposing to do there is extremely dangerous, probably involving a direct confrontation with the authorities in Talagh, whom you call the Watchers. I am of course well aware of their power and their ruthlessness. I believe you must have some hope of success, some factor they have not taken into account, but however good a hope that is, you think it very likely that you will all perish in the attempt, and you accept the risk.

“That is your right. But I think I also have acquired some minor rights from our association. I assume that you are aware that Miss Saranja and I have become emotionally involved with each other. Since my mother died, there has hitherto been no one in my life about whom I have cared deeply. I have met and liked many people, but there has been no one, until these last few weeks, whom I have loved. If she is now to be taken from me, am I to live out the rest of my life ignorant of why this was necessary?”

What a strange man, Maja thought for the umpteenth time. Here he was, desperately in love with Saranja, worried to bits about the unseen dangers ahead of her, yet talking about it like a fussy schoolmaster teaching bored kids about something that had been over and done with years ago.

“We can’t tell you much, I’m afraid,” said Ribek. “It isn’t that we don’t trust you. We didn’t, at first, of course, but we do now. It’s just that some of what we’re trying to do means that we know stuff it’s extremely dangerous for anyone to know—dangerous in the end for everyone in the Empire, not just themselves. I’ll give you an example. We’d barely started on our journey, in fact we’d only just met Benayu, when we did something that happened to attract the Watchers’ attention. It was no use running away. They had the power to trace us wherever we went. A very dear friend of Benayu’s, a sort of middle-range magician, stayed to confront them, deliberately destroying himself in the process. He did this partly to make it seem that he alone had been responsible for the magical activity they’d noticed, so that we could escape, but partly also because he knew a lot of the stuff I was talking about, and he was determined not to let the Watchers get hold of it.

“So I think the best I can offer is that you tell us what you know or have guessed—I bet it’s a lot more than you’ve let on—and then we’ll decide what else we can tell you.”

“Very well. I have already told you that I believe you are expecting some kind of confrontation with the Watchers at Barda, but I will start at the beginning. We have been maintaining the fiction that the four of you are close kin, but for some time I have not believed this to be the case, though I detect some family likeness between Maja and Miss Saranja, and you have just now told me that you met Benayu after your journey started. There is a further anomaly about your party, in that Rocky could well be a horse from a prince’s stables, and it is unlikely that a group of your apparent social standing should possess such an animal. This leads me to suspect that he has magical qualities that have not manifested themselves in my presence.

“Ribek has some kind of minor magical affinity with water, but not much else, I believe. Miss Saranja, of course, has her ability to destroy demons, but I think that is not a direct attribute of hers, but is associated with the object she normally wears beneath her blouse. There is something mysterious about Maja but I have had no indication of what it might be. Sometimes she seems to be listening to voices no one else can hear. Once or twice I have noticed one of you glance enquiringly at her, and her reply with a slight nod or headshake. This may be connected with her lizard pendant. I suspect that there is more to that than meets the eye.

“Benayu, on the other hand, already has considerable powers, and when he is older will be a remarkable magician, even by the standards of the Empire. This raises the question of why he has not used those powers to facilitate your journey. No doubt he could have transported you all to Barda almost instantaneously. I presume he chose not to do this because magical activity at that level would have been certain to attract the attention of the authorities. But I have been wondering why, apart from the minor change in my mule, he has done nothing that I can perceive to hasten your daily progress beyond what is natural. It is true that you have made rapid marches, and yet, except for our three encounters with groups of brigands, as far as I have been able to perceive he has not exercised his powers at all.

“The only explanation I can think of is that you fear you are already being watched, or watched for. For some days after the first episode with the brigands you were extremely apprehensive, and Maja almost exhausted herself with constant listening for hidden voices. If this is the case, I have something to contribute. I am a fully trained agent, and almost the first thing we were taught is to act on the assumption that one is being constantly sought for. The fact that one has not been apprehended does not mean that one has not been observed, because one’s opponents will prefer to delay until they can strike with maximum advantage.

“In your case, this would be not until you have reached Barda and found the object or person you seek, but before you can make use of that against the Watchers. You should therefore act on the assumption that this is going to happen, and that they will give you very little time in which to act. If that is impossible for you, then your only hope is somehow to elude their watch, or mislead them into believing that you have not yet found what you are looking for. Failing that, you must try to prepare defenses that will protect you long enough for you to put your plan into action.

“If I thought that I could help with any of this I should insist on coming with you, but if my guesses are anywhere near the truth I would be no more than a distraction and encumbrance. But can you wonder that I am extremely anxious, not only for Miss Saranja, but for all of you?”

They sat in silence. If Striclan knew so much, thought Maja, how could the Watchers not know it also? And of course they’d wait until they knew where the Ropemaker was. Why hadn’t she thought about that before? There simply wasn’t going to be time. They’d pounce at once. It was all, suddenly, hopeless.

“At least I can tell you you’re a very good spy,” said Ribek after a while. “If their other spies are that good, your Sheep-faces must know practically everything there is to be known about the Empire.”

“Alas, no,” said Striclan. “Information from agents on the ground often appears contradictory, and the tendency of the authorities is always to believe what they want to believe, even when the weight of the evidence is against it.

“Well, I will do what you ask me and leave you. I shall set out early in the morning, and get as far away from you as I can before you reach Barda. And I must thank you yet again for your companionship and wish you a successful outcome to your perilous undertaking, and so bid you farewell.”

He rose and helped Saranja to her feet. She didn’t let go of his hand. Ribek also rose and Maja scrambled up, but Benayu stayed where he was, dazed with his long dream, looking as if he hadn’t heard a word.

“Good luck to you too,” said Ribek. “I really hope we’ll see you again.”

“I’ve given him one of the finder stones,” said Saranja. “When all this is over he’s coming back to live in the Valley. And thank you for not asking any questions till now.”

Still holding hands they walked away and vanished among the shadows of the way station. There was no more nonsense that night about Striclan taking Maja with him when he left.