Angel Isle

CHAPTER

3

It was cool beneath the bridge. Reflections from the late afternoon sunlight rippled across the masonry of the arch above them. The river was low after a long summer. Rocky stood midstream, swishing his tail at flies. The three humans rested on boulders that winter floods had piled against the buttress, Saranja brooding, Ribek listlessly trailing his fingers in the current, and Maja quietly watching them. There was magic coming from both of them, she realized. Ribek was just listening to the water again, but Saranja was different. It was the same thing she’d noticed earlier on—not something she was doing, something that was being done to her. Perhaps it was the same thing Fodaro had started to ask about, a bit of magic she’d found among the warlords. But she hadn’t told them anything about it. That wasn’t like her.

“There’s a strange hawk over the woods,” said Ribek suddenly. “It wasn’t there this morning.”

“Nor were we,” said Saranja. “How…? Oh, the river told…”

Maja didn’t hear the rest of it. Something was happening to her, a sudden intense unease of the spirit, like nausea in the body, not slowly infecting her but suddenly there, a distortion of her place and balance in the world. She had to clutch at the stonework of the bridge or she’d have toppled sideways.

Saranja’s voice.

“Maja! What’s up? That was the sheep-bell. Come along. Are you all right?”

“I think the Watchers have come. Back at the pasture. I didn’t feel them coming. They were just there.”

“Right. Let’s get on with it.”

Maja steadied herself and rose.

The small flock streamed by, bewildered by the speed they were being forced to go, with the dog urging the bellwether along in front and Benayu following at the rear, occasionally whacking a rump with his staff. Saranja stepped out of the trees just as the last rank reached her. Maja followed. Benayu whistled and the dog brought the flock to a halt. He looked no less grim than before, but more in control of himself.

“Maja thinks the Watchers have reached the pasture,” she said.

“I know,” said Benayu tonelessly. “Two of them. If he gets it wrong we’ve got about ten minutes—maybe a bit more.”

“Ribek says there’s a strange hawk over the hillside. The river told him.”

“Wasn’t there before I got under the trees, but from now on…One of them will be looking through its eyes. So you can’t take the horse through the village—stand out like a sore thumb. I should look all right, with the sheep, this time of year. You’re going to have to work your way round under the trees. Up the river till you get to the old ford. Not far. Then…”

His face worked. He waited, eyes closed, until he had mastered himself, and turned to Maja.

“You know when Saranja took the wings off your horse, what you felt then? There’ll be something like that. Stronger, probably. It’ll mean Fodaro’s trying to tackle the Watchers back at our pasturage. The hawk will be looking at that. You should be able to slip across the river then. After that, there’s a track down from the ford to the top of the drove pasture. I’ll know you’re there and come and find you.”

“All right. And good luck, Benayu.”

“Not me who needs it.”

He turned away and whistled to the dog to move on.

The moment came in two waves, the first like a silent thunderclap, electric with horror and power, flinging Maja to the ground. She heard Rocky’s squeal of panic, but it had hardly begun before the second wave drowned it, an immense booming bellow, far louder than any thunder, a shuddering of the physical earth…And then the wind. She was already flat on her face but that was no shelter at all. It tore at her clothing, yanked at her hair, was about to pick her up and blast her away like a blown leaf when Ribek tumbled across her and pinned her down.

And then it was gone. Silence. No, not silence, because even in silence your ears are awake, listening for sound. There was a blankness, a deadness, where that sense of listening should have been.

She hadn’t heard the wind.

By the time she understood what had happened to her Ribek had rolled himself off her and was helping her up. His lips moved. Nothing.

“I’ve gone deaf,” she said, and pointed to her ears. He nodded and tapped his chest.

Me too.

Saranja was gone, and Rocky, but Saranja’s shoulder pack was lying on the ground. Maya pointed at it.

“Where is she?” she mouthed.

Ribek pointed across the stream.

“Roc-ky bol-ted,” he said, mouthing it the same way, so that she could read his lips.

He picked up the pack but she took it from him and in that awful non-sound helped him across the ford. Beyond that they followed a well-marked track, picking their way past fallen trees. He was leaning heavily on her shoulder by the time Saranja met them, leading Rocky, foam-flecked and heaving, though she herself was barely panting.

She pointed to her ears and Maja and Ribek made the me-too gesture. She nodded and said something, gesturing at Rocky, pointing at a gash in a foreleg, then showing them a ring on his harness, slipping it over her thumb and pointing at the wreckage of branches past which they’d just been scrambling. Rocky had snagged the ring on a broken branch and got stuck till she’d come up. She spoke again, finishing with a nod and a shrug. Could be worse. He’ll be all right. Grimly they moved on together.

Benayu came up the track to meet them with Sponge at his heels. His face was gray and haggard as an old man’s. He had clearly been weeping. Ribek moved to put an arm round his shoulders, but he shrugged himself free and started to say something.

“We can’t hear you,” said Maja, automatically.

No doubt they’d all spoken together, but Benayu held up a hand, wait, then moved along the line, pausing briefly in front of each of them to reach forward, touch both ears and murmur something with scarcely moving lips. Saranja. Rocky. Ribek. Maja. Swiftly but gently hearing returned, the crash of a falling tree, shouts and screams from the village below. Acrid smoke reeked in the wind—something down there must have caught fire.

“Won’t the Watchers have felt that?” said Saranja.

“They’re gone,” said Benayu in a choking voice. “Give me your right hands.”

He placed their three hands together and closed his own round them, above and below. His voice steadied, becoming harsh and slow.

“I will help you to find the Ropemaker,” he said. “I promise you this, because I promised Fodaro, but not for his reasons, not for yours. I will do it so that I can take vengeance on the Watchers. I will destroy them, every man and woman of them, because they destroyed him. That is the only thing that matters. If I have to destroy the whole Empire, or give it over to the Pirates, if magic vanishes from the world, let it happen, so long as the Watchers are destroyed and vanish too.”

“I understand,” said Ribek, not simply humoring or comforting, but instantly accepting the impossible vow as sane and serious. Saranja only grunted sympathetically. She knew what it was like to hate. Maja felt differently again. Until now Benayu had been for her and the other two little more than a chance-met stranger, friendly and helpful, whom she expected to thank and say good-bye to soon, and never to see again. Now she and Ribek and Saranja and Benayu were linked together, and were going to have to learn to live and endure with each other in friendship and trust for as long as their task demanded.

“We’ll help you if we can,” said Saranja.

They stood together for a while in silence, with the smashed woods all around them, as if allowing their oath to root itself steadfastly into the soil of their purpose, until Ribek seemed to grow restless and began to limp to and fro, studying the sky between the remaining branches.

“I think the hawk’s pushed off,” he said. “Or been done for along with the Watchers.”

Benayu hauled himself out of the dream of vengeance.

“That makes things easier,” he said, in a quiet, toneless voice. “Well, we’ve got a choice. The obvious thing is to get as far away from here as we can before the Watchers…No, forget it. They won’t send more Watchers, not at once, in case the same thing happens to them. They’ll try and find out from a distance. Or they’ll send someone they can afford to lose. So we’ve got a bit of time….”

“Ribek’s got to rest his leg,” said Saranja. “He isn’t up to anything more today.”

“All right,” said Benayu. “I left the sheep with Sponge down at the drove pasture. They’ll give us a reason for being there. We’d be more conspicuous sleeping out in the open, anyway, and some of the huts haven’t been smashed up. No one else is using it.

“And we’ve got to have something to eat. The village was pretty smashed up too when I came through, but there’s a farmer just below it who’s a bit further from the blast, so he should be all right. I’ll go straight down and see him and get him to come up and look at the sheep in the morning. If I let him have a couple for himself he’ll look after the rest while I’m away. With luck he’ll sell me something for supper.”

“Any chance of some decent fodder for Rocky?” said Saranja. “He’ll want more than hay. I’ll bring him with you so that he can carry it back.”

“I’ll ask the farmer. I don’t want to do any more magic than I have to. It’s a nuisance screening things and then getting rid of the traces.”

Two of the five drove huts had been blasted flat. The pasture sloped away below them, with the village on their left and its fields spreading on down the hill. Some of the houses had lost roofs and chimneys. Beyond the fields more woods, much less shattered, reached into the distance, and further off still the snow-topped peaks through which Rocky had carried his riders that morning now glistened untroubled under the setting sun. He nosed and snuffled contentedly into the feed that Benayu had bought from the farmer, while the humans sat, or in Ribek’s case lay, round the small fire Saranja had built. She and Maja were roasting gobbets of liver on pointed sticks and Ribek, flat on his back but looking a bit better now, chewed happily on his, but Benayu remained silent and hunched, gazing into the fire while he nibbled abstractedly at a morsel Saranja had bullied him into accepting.

At last he shook himself into the here and now, stuffed what was left of the liver into his mouth, chewed purposefully at it until he could swallow it, drank a mouthful of water and spoke in a low, anxious voice.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “There’s a colossal explosion of magic, two of the Watchers get wiped out, and they still haven’t sent anyone to find out what happened.”

“Would we know?” said Saranja.

“I would if it was more Watchers,” said Maja. “I didn’t feel them coming. They were suddenly there, just before the explosion. They were horrible.”

“I didn’t either,” said Benayu. “We had a system—it worked back up on the hillside, when we first realized they were coming. They must have picked that up and canceled it somehow. Perhaps that’s what took them so long…. Anyway, it’s going to be dark soon. We’d better get the fire out.”

“I’ll do that,” said Maja, and began carefully to rake it apart.

“What did happen?” said Saranja, but Benayu shook his head.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” he said wearily. “I’m not trying to be all mysterious about it because I’m a magician, but a lot of it’s stuff it’s dangerous to know. Really dangerous. Not just dangerous to you, dangerous to everybody—everybody in the Empire, anyway. If the Watchers get hold of you they won’t just kill you. They’ll take you apart, find out everything about you, all you’ve ever done, all you know. And if they find out some of the stuff Fodaro discovered they’ll become even more powerful than they are now—far more—and there’ll be nothing they can’t do, and nothing to stop them doing it.

“That’s why Fodaro died. He didn’t do it for our sake. He took two of the Watchers with him for our sake, to help us get away. But he died for the whole world’s sake so that they couldn’t find out what he knew.

“But I’ll tell you as much as I can because…well, I suppose because I’ve got to talk to you about Fodaro. He was a very good man—too good to be a good magician, really. He was only an ordinary third-level magician, but he was a pretty good scholar. He knew a lot more than he could do, he used to say. And on top of that he was a genius.

“Mathematics was his thing. And astronomy, I suppose. I built that pool up there for him. He told me what he wanted but he couldn’t do it himself, so I did it. It was his way of looking at the stars.

“But for him the astronomy was only part of the mathematics. He said that if you want to find the how and why of anything you have to measure everything you can about it so that you can put it into numbers, and then you work out how the numbers fit and put that into an equation, and then you can use them to understand the real world and do things in it. You can get an equation that’s almost right, and it’ll work well enough until you run into something that doesn’t fit. Then you either have to change your equation or start all over again.

“Magic is stuff that oughtn’t to fit in the real world….”

“I’ve always said it was nonsense,” said Saranja.

“Yes, but somehow it works,” said Benayu. “Fodaro wanted to find the equations that would tell him why. I’ve gone to bed leaving him sitting by the fire, thinking stuff out, and woken up and seen him still there, with his eyes open and the firelight glinting off them, and he’s still been there in the morning, wide awake but almost too stiff to move.

“In the end he came up with three equations for the how and why of magic. I know them by heart and I can use them, but I don’t really understand them. I can’t make a picture in my head of what they’re doing when they’re working. And I certainly don’t understand how he came up with them. I don’t think anyone else could have done it, not even by magic. That’s why it’s safe to tell you about him.

“But I can’t tell you much more about Jex. If the Watchers ever found out that he and his kind exist it’d be a disaster for them, but you already know that he’s there so it can’t be helped. I suppose you’d better know that he feeds on magic. That’s why he was useful to us. He could help mop up the overflow of whatever we were doing and stop it getting out to the Watchers. And he can protect Maja a bit now by mopping up some of the heavy stuff before it reaches her. But a sudden overdose of magic knocks him sideways, so he’s developed a sort of warning mechanism that can tell him when something like that is coming his way so that he can be ready for it. That’s useful too.”

“You were scared when we came,” said Maja. “Not just you. The whole hillside. Everything.”

“A winged horse is big magic, far bigger than anything we’d been doing. That’s scary in itself. But Jex had sensed you coming and was ready for it and managed to absorb it somehow. What he wasn’t ready for was Saranja suddenly saying the Ropemaker’s name. That took him completely by surprise and knocked him out. I think he might have died if Fodaro hadn’t thought of getting Saranja to do that stuff with the feathers.

“Now he’s in a sort of coma. He’s still absorbing a little of whatever magic is going on around him. He can’t help it, any more than you can help breathing, so he’s giving Maja a bit of protection, but he can’t do anything extra to shield us or warn us.

“That’s why we were worried sick, Fodaro and me. Jex might have absorbed some of the signal before he passed out, but he couldn’t possibly have coped with all of it. And Rocky was still there, completely unshielded, far more than I could possibly screen, let alone in a hurry. But when Saranja took Rocky’s wings off the signal dropped almost to zero, and nothing happened and nothing happened, and we thought we’d got away with it.

“And then, suddenly, the Watchers were coming after all. We’d always known it might happen, so we’d set up a system, nothing to do with Jex, a sort of maze with a separate warning system, to slow them down and give us a bit of time. It wasn’t so we could run or hide—that doesn’t work with them. They’ll find you in the end. The only hope was to use the equations to take them by surprise with something they hadn’t got any defenses against. And that fitted in with something else that mattered even more than we did, something about that particular bit of hillside—can’t tell you what, but it was all to do with Fodaro’s equations too—and it would be a disaster if the Watchers found out about it. So the only thing to do was to destroy it. Of course we didn’t want to, not if we could possibly help it, but it wasn’t something you could arrange at the last minute, so we’d got it all ready to go, just in case.

“Fodaro worked out how to do it and I set it up. It was an extremely delicate balance. Two…”

He stopped and stared at his hands. In an unconscious gesture he’d raised them in front of his chest and was holding them, stretched flat and almost touching, palm to palm. Deliberately he folded them together and laid them in his lap.

“No, that’s telling you too much,” he said in the same listless, weary voice. “Anyway, if whoever did it got it dead right, there’d be an explosion, and in the instant before it happened he’d get out. A scrap too little, and it wouldn’t happen at all. A scrap too much, and…well, you felt what happened. But if he got it right, the Watchers, or whoever had come for us, wouldn’t be ready for it. It wouldn’t be any sort of magic they’d ever run up against, and that would be two fewer Watchers in the world, and our traces completely covered.

“I think I could have done it. I was pretty sure he couldn’t. That’s what we were arguing about. Oh, blood, I wish I hadn’t had to leave him like that. He didn’t try to pretend what he was going to do was a certainty, but he said if I stayed to help him they’d get us both, and that would be his whole life wasted, but if I got away in time it wouldn’t. He said that now you’d come it didn’t really matter what happened to him, but I had to get away because this was what I’d been born for. This was the moment they should all have waited for.”

“Who’s they?” said Ribek.

“The Andarit. The Free Great Magicians. When the Watchers decided to take complete control they began by picking off the other fifth-level magicians one by one, sucking them in or just destroying them, until the ones who were left realized what was happening and decided to band together and try to fight them. They called themselves the Andarit.

“My parents were two of them. I never knew them. They didn’t love each other or anything—magicians don’t do that—but they wanted a child to carry on the fight if the Watchers got them. If I was any good, of course. They couldn’t even use magic to make sure. It had to be a clean break, so the Watchers couldn’t trace me. They just had to take the chance.”

“That makes two of us,” muttered Saranja.

Benayu frowned at her, not understanding.

“Not born to be loved,” explained Ribek. “Her mother wanted a daughter who could hear what the cedars were saying.”

“Oh, I don’t blame them for not loving me. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to. They couldn’t have. We all have our own…anima, the books call it. It means soul, spiritual essence, inner self, something like that. It’s the place where we keep our really important feelings, all the stuff that really matters to us. Even hedge magic is bad for it, if you do it all the time, and a lot of serious, powerful magic eats it away until you stop being human.

“There are just a very few, like the ones in your story—Asarta and Faheel and the Ropemaker—whose anima is strong enough to stand it. But almost all serious magicians have to find a safe place to keep their anima, utterly separate from themselves and out of their reach, until the time comes for them to put their magic aside and become human again.

“That’s why my father and my mother couldn’t love me. Magicians can have feelings—spite, anger, envy, pity even—but they’re different, cold, so that the magician can control the feeling and use its power. But there’s no such thing as cold love. It doesn’t make sense.

“My parents weren’t bad people. They knew what was right, and tried to do it, and died for it in the end. But all in a cold way. They died because they knew what the Watchers would do to them if they were caught alive. They booby-trapped every step of the way as they went, in case anyone tried to follow them and bring them back. Yes, they were very powerful magicians, but all the magic in the world couldn’t make them love me.

“Fodaro didn’t want me to be like that. At first he told them he wouldn’t help them unless they could think of a way round it. They said it couldn’t be done, it was a sort-of all-or-nothing thing. How can your anima be a living part of you, right at your center, and at the same time utterly separate? But there are things in mathematics a bit like that—impossible numbers that actually work—so Fodaro decided he’d look after me until I was old enough to choose for myself. And then he found a place in the sheep pasture, and there the answer was, waiting for him in the equations.

“There’s a lot more to the equations than that, and the one great thing we’ve got going for us is that the Watchers don’t know any of it, and it’s going to be too late for them when they find out. Yes, by all the Powers and Levels, they’ll find out!”

“What a load to carry at your age!” said Saranja. “It makes my kicking and screaming about having to take on Woodbourne and the stupid unicorns look pretty petty. Was Fodaro really your uncle? Why wasn’t he in with the others?”

“He wasn’t good enough. He was my father’s brother, but he was just an ordinary third-level magician because he couldn’t make the shift. Partly couldn’t, partly didn’t want to.”

“These levels,” said Ribek, “they’re real? I mean, we do a thing called kick-fighting in the Valley and we have grades for that, but that depends on how many bouts you’ve won and who you’ve beaten and so on.”

“They’re only sort-of real. That’s one of the big things Fodaro found out. It’s in his equations. But even he couldn’t actually imagine what the real thing is like, the way you can imagine, well, levels, for instance—something like stories in a building you can go up and down stairs between. He said his mind wasn’t the right shape. Nobody’s is.

“So magicians have always talked about levels, because that’s what it feels like. You know at once when you make a shift, because you have to change yourself to do it. It’s like learning to breathe a different kind of air. Third to fourth is the hardest. That’s like learning to breathe water, Fodaro said. He never could do it, though he knew what made it so difficult. I haven’t tried—too much of a risk, I don’t know enough—but I don’t think it will be a problem for me.

“That whole old theory of magic is one of those almost-fit things. It’s worked well enough for centuries and everyone thought it was right. But then Fodaro found the place in the pasture, and looked at some very distant stars in the pool I built him, and found things that didn’t fit. So he went back to the beginning and started again.

“That’s all I’m going to tell you about that. I want to talk about Fodaro himself.

“Mostly I don’t even think about my parents. Fodaro was the only person I’ve ever had to love. Him and Sponge”—he nodded toward the dog, half drowsing as he guarded the sheep—“and Jex, I suppose, but you can’t really love him—he’s too different.

“No, Fodaro was the only one, really. He was my father and my mother and everyone else. My parents gave me to him almost as soon as I was born—as soon as they were sure I had the gifts in me. They chose him because the Watchers were only interested in fourth-and fifth-level magicians those days, and he took me away and they never saw me again. They wanted as clean a break as they could make.

“He wanted that too, but not for the same reason. Or at least not mainly. He was as keen as they were to stop the Watchers controlling everything, and as far as he could he wanted to help me do it. But until then he wanted me to grow up with someone who really loved me, someone I could love back. And that’s what he gave me.

“He hired a wet-nurse to feed me when I was tiny, but he did everything else, fed me and dressed me, played with me and carried me around in a pouch on his chest and sang me to sleep and nursed me when I was ill. He never used magic to make me better, only sometimes to find out what medicines to give me, but he never let magic touch me until I began to do it for myself.

“Before I could walk or talk I started making things come to me if they looked interesting. One day, when I’d just learned to crawl, he left me with a neighbor while he went to market. Her bitch had a new litter. He came back to find that my cot was empty, and the neighbor was having hysterics, and there was an extra puppy sucking at the bitch’s teats.

“All that low-level stuff—stuff on the surface of things—it’s never been any problem for me. Some ways it’s been too easy. If you find everything easy—if you never have to puzzle anything out—then you never have to think how anything connects, because it doesn’t, up in the easy levels. That happens way down, at deeper and deeper levels, as the connections on the level above connect with each other. If you wanted to change the whole world you’d have to go right down to the single root of everything, below the fifth and below the sixth to where the Tree of the World grows all alone, that carries the stars on the tips of its branches, and the clouds, and the singing birds, and the tears of humankind.

“It isn’t really like that, of course, it’s just how it feels, like the layers of rock in the cliff or breathing a different kind of air. The last bit, about the World Tree, comes from a poem Fodaro gave me to learn….”

He paused and looked up, tense and watchful.

“There’s someone at the cottage,” he said. “He’s trying to open the locks. So he’s not a Watcher—they’d have no problem. There—he’s done it, he thinks. So he’s a magician—third-level at a guess. There’s no one that good round here…. Wait. Ah, now get out of that, you bastard….”

“You don’t think he just happened along?” said Ribek.

“Didn’t feel like it. He’d come in a hurry. I think the Watchers didn’t want to lose two more of themselves, so they sent somebody they could spare. We should be all right for tonight—I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll take the sheep down to the farmer first thing, and then we’d better be on our way.”

“Do you know where we’re going?” said Maja.

“Away from here, for a start,” said Benayu. “As far and as fast as possible without using magic. That means south. After that we’re going to start looking for this Ropemaker of yours, though I’ve no idea how or where. Jex might know, but he can’t tell us.”

“He’ll be somewhere in the Empire, won’t he?” said Saranja. “That must mean south too.”

“Are we going to have enough money?” said Ribek. “We haven’t got any. We don’t use Empire money in the Valley, and in the story there were endless bribes to pay wherever you went. Or have things changed?”

“No, of course not. It’s always been like that. Fodaro says…used to say…the Watchers are all for it, because it means people’s lives are one long struggle against corrupt officials and they don’t have time to worry about what the Watchers are up to. I’ve brought what we had in the cottage—I hope that’ll get us to one of the safe places Fodaro told me about, and there’ll be people there who’ll give us money. If not I’ll have to use magic. It’s too dangerous to make or fetch money, because any good magician can smell that at once, and it’s a nasty death if you’re found with any you got that way, but I should be able to fetch one or two things we can sell.”

“I may have something,” said Saranja, beginning to fish in under the coarse, high-necked blouse a farmer’s wife had given her on her way to Woodbourne. “My warlord was in council when his brother attacked. He liked to have me there, sitting on a stool by his knee, wearing a lot of his jewelery and precious little else, because I was the mother of his sons. It was a way of showing how rich and powerful he was. This was one of his prize possessions. It’s a sort of all-purpose amulet. It’s famous. It’s even got a name, Zald-im-Zald. It didn’t really belong to him, or anyone else. He’d looted it from another warlord who’d looted it from somewhere else, and so on.

“Anyway, there I was sitting on that stupid stool and smiling away till my face ached, when all of a sudden the castle was full of his brother’s soldiers. There hadn’t been any warning. Somebody must have betrayed him and opened the gates. Everyone was rushing around screaming. Five years I’d been longing for something like this to happen and worked out exactly what I was going to do if it did. I ran down to one of the laundry rooms and put some clothes on over what I was wearing and ran on to the kitchens. Nobody bothered me—they were all eating and drinking themselves stupid—but I grabbed a sack of scraps and I was out through an unused sewer-pipe I’d found and well into the desert before I remembered I was still wearing Zald-im-Zald. We’ll have to take it apart and sell it stone by stone, of course. We’d never find anyone who could pay for the whole thing. It isn’t as if I’d stolen it, at least no more than my warlord had, and I reckoned he owed me. Three times over he owed me, three times over. Once for myself and once for each of my sons. I was never even allowed to nurse them, you know. They were brought up by eunuchs in another part of the palace. They weren’t even told I was their mother. Oh, it’s mine all right.”

While she was speaking she’d carefully eased out from under her blouse and laid across it a prodigious ornament, far more than a necklace or pendant, a kind of chestpiece the size of a child’s face. At its center was an oval of brown-gold amber, clear as a drop of liquid but filled with inward fire from the refracted and reflected sunset. This was circled by faceted red gems, each the size of a man’s thumbnail, and out from these fanned sprays of smaller jewels, dark gold and then paler and then almost colorless, all set into a lacework of gold, stiff enough to hold its shape but flexing to follow the contours of the flesh beneath.

“Perhaps you’d better have a look at it, Benayu,” she said. “It’s supposed to be full of powers, but everyone’s forgotten what they are.”

He leaned forward, held his hand for a moment above the ornament, and carefully withdrew it and sat staring at it, breathing deeply. To Maja he seemed suddenly more involved, more alive, than at any time since he’d sworn his oath in the woods above the sheep pastures.

“Well,” he said. “It’s pretty near dormant at the moment, apart from one little stone. Just as well—if it was all activated it would send out a signal strong as a beacon. And there’s a curse on anyone who tries to question it or take it apart. I think I can deal with that, but you’d better not be wearing it while I’m at it.”

Saranja slipped the gold chain over her head and handed the ornament to him, but as she let go of the chain the strange vague magical feeling that Maja had all along sensed coming from her suddenly ceased. In the same instant she collapsed forward, almost into the embers of the fire. Maja jumped to her feet and helped Benayu haul her clear and turn her over. She seemed to be fast asleep, her face calm, her breathing slow and heavy. Benayu felt her pulse and nodded.

“Nothing we can do,” he said, and returned to the jewel. “It’ll be that active stone. This one. It makes the wearer tireless. Only you pay for it after. It must have been made to switch itself on when the wearer starts to get exhausted. How long ago was that?”

“Five days in the desert, she told us,” said Ribek, reaching for her wrist from where he lay. “And at least four since. She may have taken it off at night. I didn’t see.”

“And she’s still breathing? It ought to have killed her. How’s her pulse?”

“Not bad. Very slow, but fairly strong.”

“All right. Just leave her there for the moment while I close it down,” said Benayu.

He knelt beside Saranja’s body and laid the jewel across her chest. Maja sensed a blip of power suddenly woken, and Saranja began to stir. Supporting her left hand with his right, with his other hand Benayu moved the tip of its middle finger in gentle circles over one of the jewels, three times one way and then three times the other. Maja could feel a second blip as the power subsided and Saranja returned to sleep.

“That’s the best we can do,” he said, rising. “Nothing’s going to wake her till she’s ready, and that won’t be for a day or two yet, at a guess.”

He took Saranja’s shoulders and Maja her feet and between them they dragged her into the nearest hut, laid her on sheepskins on one of the rough bunks and covered her with a blanket. When they came out Benayu picked up the jewel, walked a couple of paces down the slope and laid it at his feet. Maja watched him stretch out and turn slowly, taut with concentration, pointing in succession at three boulders spread across the slope, then at the forest edge around and behind the huts, and back to the first hut. A barely visible flicker of light followed his movement and she could feel the rich, humming vibrations of magic as it leaped from mark to mark. Satisfied, he settled down and crouched over Zald-im-Zald, but then glanced up at her.

“That’s enough of a screen, I hope,” he said. “Anyway, it’s as much as I can manage. They’re bound to be looking this way. There’s too much hedge magic going on for them to have noticed what I was doing to Zald just now, but dealing with the whole thing’s going to be bigger stuff. Why don’t you go out beyond the screen, Maja, and give me a shout if any of it gets through? Sponge can go with you in case of trouble. Just call him. That’s all right, boy. Go and keep an eye on her.”

Maja couldn’t feel the screen at all until she reached it. Then there was a slight extra tingle as she passed through it. She could feel it stretching from point to point like dew-beaded spiderwebs slung between bushes on an autumn morning. Beyond it nothing.

Without Sponge beside her it would have been scary out there on the edge of the strange, deep-shadowed woods. She tangled her fingers into his fur and waved to Benayu that she was ready. He crouched over the jewel again. Ribek had raised himself onto his elbow to watch him.

For some while he didn’t seem to be doing anything except staring at the jewel. At one point his body tensed, but then he relaxed and continued his inspection. After about five minutes he raised his right hand, extended his forefinger, and with the fingertip held slightly above them started to trace the pattern of jewels, working from the outer edges inward. In the gathering dusk each stone glimmered or twinkled with its natural light as the finger passed above it, and even at this distance she could see the glow of it flicker off Ribek’s face, as though a fiery spark were running from jewel to jewel. Faintly she could feel the web of Benayu’s screen flex and quiver as it responded to the passing shocks of magic. At last he rose and waved to her to return. When she reached him, he was trembling slightly, and there were beads of sweat on his upper lip.

“I think it was all right,” she said. “I could feel something happening, but only just. I wouldn’t have if I’d been further away.”

“Trickier than I thought,” he said. “There was one nasty moment. I knew it was probably booby-trapped, because Fodaro had warned me about that. When we took the sheep to market in Mord he used to look the stalls over for amulets and charms, and buy anything he thought might be useful. Sometimes the dealers had no idea what they were for, and when we got home we’d find out and sell them on or give them to the other shepherds. Anyway, I was just starting to disarm the trap when I realized it was a bit simple for a thing like Zald-im-Zald, and I found the trap itself was booby-trapped. That was a tricky one.

“You know, it’s a really amazing object. I don’t think we should break it up completely—I don’t know if we could, safely. Most of the little stones round the outside are just ornaments, and we could take a few of those, perhaps, and get somebody to replace them later. But look. This is the one that kept Saranja going. These two are healers, for burns and wounds. We can try the wound one on your leg in a moment, Ribek. This one is something very strange, very old. I don’t dare meddle with it in case it’s something I can’t screen. These two are finders—you give one to the person you want to keep track of, or hide it on them if you don’t want them to know, and you can always find them. This one drives out fear. This will stop you getting fever. And so on. I don’t think this one’s got any powers of its own, but kings and heroes have been killed for it again and again, and that cranks up the power of all the others. And these are locks. They’re to guard the amber in the middle and keep the power in it sleeping. I don’t dare touch that either, but it must be something really big, fifth-level, at least—sixth, even. You can do all sorts of things with amber. It comes from the far north, from the top of the world. They do a different kind of magic there.

“Now let’s see what we can do about Ribek’s wound. You want to try, Maja? This one here. Middle finger of your left hand, three turns to the left and three to the right to activate it, and the same to put it to rest. They all open pretty much the same way, these basic charms.”

“You don’t need Saranja’s own hand?” said Ribek.

“You would for most of them. She’s been wearing Zald long enough for it to have attached itself specifically to her, but that wouldn’t make sense with a woundsain. It draws its healing power from the person who’s holding it, so you can’t use it on yourself. Trouble, Maja?”

Maja had reached unsuspecting toward Zald-im-Zald. The stone he’d shown her seemed not much different from any of the others, a clear, pinkish gold about the size of her fingernail. She could sense the sleeping power of the whole great object, but it didn’t trouble her. Then, just before her finger touched the surface, something had seemed to leap across the gap, and instinctively she’d snatched her hand away.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It was just a surprise. It didn’t hurt.”

This time she managed not to flinch, though the buzzy sensation continued as she circled her fingertip over the surface of the jewel, and ceased only when she picked it out of its setting and cradled it in her palm. Now all she could feel was the quiet flow of something passing from her to it.

She waited while Ribek unwound the bloodstained cloths from his leg, carefully cutting them free with his knife-point where they had stuck to the flesh. The wound, when he reached it, looked perhaps marginally better than it had when Saranja had dressed it a few hours back, but was still oozing blood and pus.

“Do I just touch the place with it, and it’s well again?” said Maja. “It feels…oh…gentler than that.”

Benayu didn’t answer, so she looked up and saw that he was no longer watching, but leaning back against the wall of the hut and gazing out over the darkened distances.

“Start with an easy bit and see what happens,” suggested Ribek.

She experimented, and saw the edges of a minor laceration gradually close together as she stroked the stone along it until the exposed flesh was covered with soft, pinkish, new-healed skin.

Behind her Benayu gave a deep and lonely sigh and shuddered himself back into the world.

“We’ll have to go through Mord,” he said. “It’s the only road south. And there’s a woman in the market there who mostly deals in charms and stuff, but she does jewels as a sideline. We can sell something out of Zald to her. I really don’t want to sell any more of the flock than I have to. It depends how long I’m away, and whether I’ve got any money when I come back. If I haven’t, and I’m gone for months and months, he’ll have to keep the lot, and I’ll start again the way Fodaro did, curing the shepherds’ flocks and making amulets and charms that actually work.

“I really love shepherding. They’re a separate tribe, you know, the shepherds all along these mountains, with their own language and their own customs. They won’t let anyone else join them or use their pastures. They’re very proud and fierce, the women as well as the men. When Fodaro first brought me here—I was only two then—they had an infectious gum rot spreading through their flocks along the whole range, and he cured it for them and spent all one summer cleaning the snails that carried it out of their pastures, so they let him stay and gave him some sheep to get started with. They don’t live in one place. They move to and fro in a pattern that allows the grass to recover, so we did that too, some of the time, as a way of not drawing attention to what Fodaro found back at our pasture. The great thing about them is that they know who they are and where they belong and what their purpose is. I really love that. I love the life. It hasn’t been at all like what Saranja was saying. I’ve never felt I was carrying a terrible burden. I don’t now. I know who I am, and what I’m for. I’m going to destroy the Watchers, and then I’m going to go back to shepherding.”

He rambled peacefully on about his far-off, impossible-seeming future until the flesh had closed completely over Ribek’s wound and the skin grown smooth and clean. Maja rose and stretched. She could feel that something had gone out of her, leaving a sort of satisfied tiredness, as if after enjoyable exercise.