Corsair

VIII

Corena had asked them what an Orphanidon was. She did not need to ask about a Clever, of course. Even the most isolated, most far-flung of folk knew about Clevers: the few people who could tap the raw stuff of the four entelechs, the pure and inchoate essences that made up the world and all its contents. Bearers of great power, and of great burdens since the exercise of that power leeched away their own strength and life.

In all likelihood, Corena had never seen a Clever, unless it was some untrained hedge-witch wandering the land in defiance of the strictures of the School. Yulan had, though. The Free counted several among its ranks, and upon that simple fact was built much of its great reputation and might. He had seen them do things beyond imagination, channelling the pure, formless essence of the entelechs and giving it shape and power in the physical world. And he had seen them pay the price for those deeds in fevers and slumbers, frailties and withering.

So Corena knew what the word meant. But as Yulan watched her, he suspected that it was possible to know without really understanding. She did not look frightened enough for full understanding.

They were huddled – Yulan and Hamdan and Corena and the three children, with half a dozen others – in what had once been a stable. It leaned up against an undamaged stretch of the castle’s wall, off to one side of the keep. Its timbers were so rotted by worm and rain that it would probably have collapsed without that support. Certainly it had not served as a stable for many, many years. There was nothing there but a midden piled up in one corner that stank of decay and human excrement.

The whole courtyard had a fine layer of dust spread over it now. So too did Yulan’s face and clothes. He tried to brush it away, but it was stubbornly persistent stuff.

From where they crouched, they could see the doors to the keep. They could see as well the half-wrecked gatehouse. It might be possible to climb out over or through the mound of rubble there, but it would not be easy or fast.

At Yulan’s side, Hamdan was shouting questions. It sounded like anger, though Yulan knew it was as much alarm. Perhaps even fear.

‘Who’s the Clever?’ Hamdan shouted at the men and women cowering in the furthest corner of the stables. ‘Who is it? Are they an Aestival? A Vernal? What?’

He was asking what kind of Clever they faced. Which of the four entelechs – Vernal, Aestival, Autumnal, Hibernal – he or she was most in tune with, most capable of calling forth. It was obvious from the faces of those Hamdan addressed that they did not know the answer, perhaps did not even understand the import of the question. In truth, it hardly mattered. A Clever was a Clever.

‘Hush,’ Yulan murmured.

Hamdan looked at him.

‘I’d say we’ve got roughly no time at all to come up with a way out,’ Yulan said. ‘Lake’s close, if he’s not already here.’

‘Time’s not favouring us, right enough,’ Hamdan conceded.

‘Maybe Corena was right,’ Yulan said. ‘She said it’s all coins and caution for us, and she’s not wrong. Maybe I should have taken Kottren’s head the first moment I set eyes on him.’

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ Hamdan hissed. ‘You didn’t take his head because we didn’t know what would happen next if you did. Doing something without knowing what’ll follow is the last arrow in your quiver, not the first. Everyone’s got their own reasons for fighting, but people give us the coin because we’re supposed to be good at it and caution’s a part of that.

‘Look around you. Doesn’t this look like a bad idea from top to bottom? The mad bastard’s dead and he’s still managed to trap us in one of his cages, sure as any of his beasts.’

‘All of us,’ Yulan agreed with a brief backward glance.

‘You want to try and get them all out,’ Hamdan said. Not challenging this time.

‘Don’t you?’

‘The children. Yes.’

Hamdan had left a son behind in Massatan lands, Yulan knew. He had never asked why the archer had left, for it was not in his nature – or Massatan habit – to delve into another man’s history or heart. He had the sense, though, that it had not been a hard choice or a source of much regret save for that one thing: the child.

‘We have to get down to the boats, and do it before Lake reaches them, to have much of a chance,’ Yulan said.

He turned about and said to no one in particular, to everyone, ‘Is there a way down to the harbour without going through the keep?’

Several of those who had lived within these shabby walls nodded. One of the children – the oldest perhaps, though Yulan still found age hard to read amid the grime and ill health – quietly and cautiously said, ‘There’s a door at the …’

But she fell silent as if a knife had cut her voice, staring with wide eyes over Yulan’s shoulder. He turned to see what had so alarmed her, even as he heard Hamdan cursing and felt the archer surging to his feet.

In the midst of the courtyard, the ground was heaving. A section of cobblestones the width of a man’s outstretched arms was lumping up as if alive. Yulan stood beside Hamdan. Behind them, people were crying out in fear.

‘That’ll be us out of time, then,’ said Hamdan.

What arose before them, what shaped itself from the stone and dirt and dust of the ground, was horrible. A memory gone awry of the human form. Stunted and contorted, blunt-limbed. A cankerous outgrowth of the earth itself, clad in the yard’s cobbles like plated skin.

‘Run for that door, wherever it is,’ Yulan shouted over his shoulder.

He heard them doing as he commanded, vaguely aware of the direction of their flight, but he reserved his attention for the monstrous apparition that lurched towards him and Hamdan. The thing’s short legs never parted from the ground. They merged with it – they were of it – so that it should not have been able to move. Could not have, were it not a manifestation of the entelechs given shape by a Clever and thus unmoored from the laws of the possible.

Hamdan launched an arrow at the unnatural form, and the shaft shivered and rebounded from its stone armour. Dust shook loose at the figure’s every stride, wreathing it. Its bones of earth and rock sighed and scraped as it moved.

Hamdan slung his bow across his shoulder and drew his short-sword.

‘Arrows won’t serve,’ he said glumly.

‘Put some space between us,’ Yulan said, already drifting sideways himself.

He frowned at the impossible opponent before him. It was all wrong. Nothing like anything the skilled Clevers who served the Free would ever make from their power. To clothe the limitless potential of an entelech in this mockery of the human form was needless. To choose a form so small – the figure barely stood as tall as his chest – was oddly half-hearted.

Yet it was enough to kill both him and Hamdan, of course. More than enough, with its stone hide and cudgel arms. Only if it could catch them, though. There was the glimmer of hope in this darkness. It was – so far – imprecise and heavy in its movements. It would be too much to hope that it would remain so; it could be as fast and strong as the Clever who made it wished, if they were willing to spend enough of their own vitality on its making. But they might be able to occupy it long enough that the others could reach the boats alive.

Hamdan, it seemed, had greater ambitions than mere delay. He darted in and put a savagely precise slash into the seam between two cobblestones, midway along the thing’s outstretched arm. His blade cut through and burst out the other side in a cloud of dirt and loose earth. Parts of that arm fell away. What remained re-formed itself.

The earthen figure twisted and lashed out at the archer, a sudden vigour to its movement. The blow caught him across the back. Glancing, but hard enough to spin him about and stagger him and have him crying out in pain.

Yulan rushed forward. His eyes mapped that rocky skin as he ran. He tracked the shifting and sliding of cobbles across its flank, the flowing of the earth and pebbles beneath them. The moment came, the opening, and he swept his sword through its side, where the ribs would have been were it a living thing. The blade rattled against stones, inside the mass, shook in his hand, but it did not stop. Gouts of earth and rock burst out. The Clever-made monster slumped and sagged.

But it flung out more limbs, thin tendrils sprouting from its torso that engulfed him so suddenly he was powerless to avoid them. It embraced him in fierce dust and stone and squeezed. He was taller than it, and his arms were still free. He hammered down at one of the arms holding him with the hilt of his sword. It did nothing but jar his arm and scrape the skin from the side of his hand.

For an unreal moment as he felt the air rushing out from his lungs, his chest tightening and trembling, he was looking down at the upturned head of the thing that would kill him. And he saw it change. He saw its fabric crumble and become fine dust that gathered and clumped and made of itself a distant image of a face. Lips, and the bump of a nose, and blank, smooth spaces where eyes should lie. It stared blindly up at him, and he stared back. Into the face of a child.

The lips parted and, from out of the dark hollow behind them, dust spoke to him. Just once, but he heard it quite clearly.

‘Stay,’ it said. In the voice of a little girl.

Then the head and face erupted, burst apart sand in a gale, as Hamdan’s sword cut through. Grit blasted at Yulan’s face, almost blinding him, but he spun his sword in his upraised hands. He turned its point downward and plunged it into the roiling mass of earth where the head had been. He sank it down as far as it would go and then twisted and hauled with all his strength, ripping the blade out sideways.

In an instant the crushing coils about him fell away. It all fell away, crashing into a pile of cobblestones and earth. He fell among it, gasping for breath.

Hamdan had his arm at once and hauled him unceremoniously to his feet.

‘Everyone else is out that door, so we’d best be after them, I’d say,’ Hamdan snapped.

Yulan coughed and spat dust.

‘It’s a girl,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The Clever who’s trying to kill us. It’s one of Kottren’s children.’