Darkburn Book 3: The Gates of Kelvha by Tayin Machrie - HTML preview

Chapter 15

Yaret woke abruptly, convinced that she was back at home in Obandiro. She was down in the cold cellar with the children who had survived the fires. One of them was having a nightmare. Dil most probably, that lonely, optimistic nine-year-old; he often did.

But no. She was not lying on a chilly floor, but somewhere warm, covered with a blanket instead of an old sack. It came to her after a few bewildered seconds. This was the attic room in the women’s quarters, and she was on the top bunk – too close to the sloping ceiling, so that she would bang her head if she sat up in a hurry. She had already learnt to think before she moved.

Lying there, she listened. Who was it, groaning and muttering? Not Durba, who was sleeping soundly in the bunk below her: not Shebel in the upper bunk opposite. So it must be Maeneb.

Although Maeneb was not a deliberately cheerful nine-year-old, it had sometimes occurred to Yaret that the reticent woman, despite her avoidance of other people, might be lonely. So now she slithered down from her bed and seized her stick to hobble over to the bunk, one-footed, in the dark.

Her body told her that it was still two hours or so to dawn. A little moonlight illuminated the attic: the light from the occasional lamps dotted along the streets outside did not reach this high. She could not tell if Maeneb was awake or not.

“Maeneb?” she whispered. A grunt, a pause. Well, Maeneb was awake now.

“What?”

“Are you all right? You were muttering.”

“Sorry.” Another pause. “I think I must have been… hearing voices in my sleep.”

“I thought you could shut them out.”

“Usually I can,” said Maeneb, sounding weary, “but there are so many here. And they never stop. They just leak through.”

“You could ask Shebel for a sleeping draught.”

“I’d rather not.” After a moment Maeneb added, “I need to know what’s going on. There have been a lot of… difficult voices here.”

“You mean difficult to interpret?”

“I mean difficult to bear.” Yet another pause. “There’s a lot of misery in this city.”

Yaret considered this, wondering how Maeneb would have fared in the devastated cellars of Obandiro. But there were fewer voices there. So few; so few. “There’s a lot of misery in every city, I expect,” she said.

Maeneb was silent.

“Try to sleep,” suggested Yaret.

“I keep thinking I feel stonemen,” said Maeneb’s voice. She sounded desolate.

Alarm coursed through her. “Stonemen? Here, in Kelvha? Surely that’s not possible.”

“I know. They’re probably not stonemen – almost certainly they’re not – but all the same. There’s just something there that keeps reminding me of them. It’s the… the narrowness of mind. The focus on one thing, and everything beyond a blur. Hard to explain.”

Yaret said, “Do you mean the effect of the drugs, the Athelid the stonemen took?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Probably there are people in the city taking drugs as well,” she said, “that’s all.”

“Yes.”

“So try to sleep.”

“Yes.”

Yaret hobbled back to her bunk and contemplated how to scramble up to it without waking Durba. Bathroom first. By the time she returned she felt fully awake. Maeneb’s words – though surely without foundation – had set her nerves and reason jangling.

Stonemen. She’d managed not to think about them for the last few days: there had been so much going on that it was relatively easy to shelve them in the recesses of her mind. The dreadful battles in the north against the stoneman army, Yaret had told herself, were over now, although she knew that they were not, and that Huldarion and the Vonn would in due course have to ride out in battle once again – next time, she understood, towards the south.

But that would be with Kelvha at their back. Their new allies. It should be easier. And the stoneman army had been thoroughly dispersed. So why would Maeneb feel any minds like stonemen’s inside Kelvha?

Standing quite still in the dark beside her bunk, Yaret remembered the first stonemen she had ever seen: that sentry by the pass above the Gyr tarn. The sentry’s back had been towards her – thank the stars – and at the time she had not understood about the circlet of stones he wore around his shaven head.

Later on she’d learnt the truth: that he wore the stones not on his head, but in it. Drilled into the skull in some incomprehensible ceremony, the thought of which still sickened her. The pain could be borne only with the aid of drugs; that Athelid whose composition was still not known, although Shebel had a sample hidden somewhere.

But Yaret had seen the effects of the Athelid’s withdrawal. That had been later on: the lone stoneman, Brael, left behind in that burnt, deserted, eerie town far in the north. Abandoned in an agony of pain. Brael had told her he was ten years old, before she killed him as he asked. Now she stared into the night, remembering. Such a winter.

Then she shook her head. Maeneb was asleep again, she guessed; but for herself, there was no sleeping now. So she did not attempt to climb into her bunk but instead strapped on her wooden foot. Then she quietly gathered her pile of clothes and boots and carried them out into the corridor where she dressed. Two hours to dawn: she could use those two hours. She’d claim she’d gone out for an early walk.

Down in the kitchen Yaret drank water from the jug, grabbed a lump of bread, and put two spoons in her pocket before she crept out of the door. She contemplated visiting the stables: should she take a horse?

No. Its hooves would be too audible in the night. And she’d be too conspicuous. So walk. It would be no more than an hour on foot, she judged, to where she aimed for.

Which was the same place she had visited two days ago, when she rode there in company with Maeneb and Rothir and Theol, around the outside of the city. Yaret had suggested the route to Theol, in order to look for the outlet by the north gate: for that was the spot nearest the place where the darkburn was imprisoned on the other side of the city walls, in the northern quarter, within the empty bath-house.

As she walked through the pre-dawn shadows she found that the narrow streets to the West Gate were by no means empty. The women’s lodgings were not in the best part of the city, if not the worst either. In the occasional dim lamplight she could see a mixture of late revellers straggling home to bed and the more purposeful early risers: workmen, tradesmen, a bread delivery, a cart-load of fresh poultry. In between them skulked or staggered a few who did not know what time it was, the permanently drunk or drugged or simply witless. A woman ran out to clutch at her coat and promise her a good time, young sir, only one small silver dreb for half an hour. A desperate woman. Yaret declined her roughly and walked on.

Passing a food stall which served breakfast to the early workers, she paused to buy from the glum seller a slice of cheese to go with her bread, and a lump of the gum that many of the workers here chewed. She knew it from her previous visits to outer Kelvha – it was some sort of tree sap, sweet for the first minute of chewing, and increasingly disgusting afterwards. It was supposed to wake you up but she suspected it contained no active ingredient beyond its acrid flavour. That certainly woke you up.

When she reached the West Gate there was no difficulty getting out. The gate was already open and a thin stream of men was on its way through: mostly farm labourers, she thought, both from the look of them and from their grumbling exchanges. Her own clothes were as nondescript and well-worn as any labourer’s, so she just followed the others. The guards were more concerned with people coming in than leaving. As they moved purposefully over to check a pair of fruit-laden carts, Yaret slipped out unchallenged.

Then she walked north, eating her bread and cheese, keeping close to the massive wall while ahead of her the labourers gradually dispersed into the shadowy fields to her left until she was alone. As she walked the world slowly transformed, the great bowl of sky in its immense unhurried revolution changing to violet alongside her. She turned her head to look; and had the unsettling sensation that someone not far behind her had stopped too.

She halted. Surreptitiously checking that her knife was in her belt, she gazed up as if to study the stars, which were now dimming. The sky over the castle to her right acquired a luminous glow, preparing for its dawn colours. Nobody walked past her. Nobody looked suspicious. She saw a couple of men trudge like shadows through the meadows to where cows were waiting patiently.

As she at last walked on again, she listened. Nothing but the lowing of the distant cows. But the earthen track would not be difficult to tread on silently. She half expected some rush of a footpad running up behind her, and was wary until she reached the first of the stalls and workshops propped up against the northern wall. There she relaxed a little, because she was no longer solitary.

One or two lamps were lit, and men were moving around the workshops, setting up for the day. Always men. No women. But she knew the women had their own allotted tasks: the cooking, sewing, weaving, washing, looking after children. Nothing was easy if you weren’t rich, whether man or woman. They would all be busy, apart from the grand ladies of the castle. Everybody had their job to do.

And here I am strolling along with hardly a care, she thought, little money in my pocket, true, but no job to do either. Except this one, which has been forbidden me by Rothir.

Back in Obandiro they’ll be starting to wake up. Morning comes earlier over in the east. What would they be doing back home: would any more survivors have arrived to swell their numbers? Was Dil still caring for the donkeys? Was Anneke’s baby sitting up yet? Had they cleared any more streets of ash, and finished rebuilding the school? Had the hob returned?

Now why had the hob sprung to her mind? The thought was as unexpected as the real thing. If the real thing was real. To her it was. She hadn’t seen a hob or lin for two weeks now – maybe three – certainly not since they entered Inner Kelvha, and she hadn’t thought about them either until now. Maybe it was a lin that she had glimpsed behind her earlier, not a footpad. That would explain why she’d seen nothing when she turned around. Look at a lin and it vanishes. Turns to a clump of grass, a weed, a rock. Nothing to see there.

Rothir would doubtless laugh at her. No, he’d frown. No, he’d look slightly exasperated, in that way he had. She wasn’t sure if Rothir believed in lins. Yet lins were no stranger than the huntress, just less visible. She hoped the huntress had forgiven him the killing of the tiger...

No, no, don’t think of her. Don’t think her name: too dangerous. Think of the darkburn. Nearly there now, at the North Gate.

She put the lump of gum into her mouth. Sweet. Now not so sweet. Oh, dear stars, she thought, how can anyone chew this for pleasure?

All the same she kept it resolutely in her mouth, chewing and trying to soften it. By now she was walking past the forge which Rothir had entered. Nobody was there yet. Though as she glanced towards the silent forge she caught a movement in the corner of her vision.

She looked back again, more closely. Nothing. Turn and it’s gone. That must have been a lin: or, more likely near all these ramshackle buildings, a hob. Hobs liked human habitations, for reasons unknown. Everything about them was unknown. But it was cheering to think that there were hobs in Inner Kelvha, so close to the city. She bowed slightly and tucked the gum against her cheek while she murmured the lin’s grace, since it served for hobs and woodwones too.

Only a hundred yards further on was the outlet from the bath-house in the northern quarter. Last time she had stood here there had been a trickle of fetid water coming through the grid: this time it seemed to be dry. Not far away, despite the uncertain twilight, she definitely saw a lin. As soon as she looked, it turned into a boulder.

She said the lin’s grace again. Presumably lins had no sense of smell, because the stink here by the iron grid was abominable: unmistakably darkburn – that stench of bitter smoke, corruption and decay.

And the aura. The desolation, grief, fear, dread, and anger. It told you to kill yourself. It told you that there was no hope. She had to stop and lean against the wall until she got used to it. Because you could get used to it: you could learn to bear it.

She took a few deep breaths. The wall was warm against her back and she wondered if that was the darkburn too, heating the stones up. How close was it to her? Only a few yards, maybe. She had not seen the bath-house on the other side but Tiburé said it went right up to the wall and probably within it.

Yaret had visited the eastern bath-house yesterday, and she could visualise the darkburn: a small, black, burning huddle in the corner of a long, deep, tiled, empty bath. She had, back at her lodgings, two stones retrieved from stonemen’s corpses, and kept for the sake of their protective effect against the darkburns. Darkburns would not come close to the stones. But she didn’t want to disturb this one, so she had left the stones behind.

After her deep breaths she still wanted to run away, or just curl up and die; but she had come here with a task in mind. She needed to tackle the locks on the iron grid before it got too light. So she looked left and right: there was a cart somewhere behind her, probably a farmer, nothing else in sight. Although the north gate was not much further round the wall, there was no traffic to it. Tiburé had told her it did not open until after dawn.

Yaret turned back to the iron grid. The pale glow in the sky was now strong enough for her to see the two big locks, one high, one low. The darkburn aura was still very bad. The darkburn must be down at this end of the baths. No wonder the Kelvhans set no guard out here – no man would stay for long.

They had guards on the city side, though, Tiburé said. That would be necessary to keep the public well away. Maybe the guards had stones, to drive the darkburn as far from them as possible. They would need to, in order to withstand the fear.

But they must have brought the darkburn in through the opening on this side. They could never have carried it in its iron cage right through the city. It would have caused a riot. So this entrance must be long and wide enough for the darkburn to have been taken all the way through.

Which meant it was long and wide enough for it to come all the way back out. Yaret glanced around to make sure nobody was watching. Another lamp was being lit in the buildings a hundred yards away, but there was no-one near her. She spat the gum out into her hand, with relief, and divided it in half. Although it was still fairly hard she could mould it now.

Taking the spoons out of her pocket, she wrapped a layer of gum around the handle of one of them. This she inserted into the keyhole of the lower lock – it fitted easily – and pressed the gum against where she thought the pins ought to be. When she retrieved it there was quite a clear impression, although whether a locksmith could make anything of it, she did not know. She repeated the process on the upper lock with the second spoon and the remaining gum. Then she wrapped up both spoons carefully in a cloth and replaced them in her pocket. The gum was already hardening as it dried.

It was probably a pointless exercise. Even if the impressions were of any use, would she dare to take them to a locksmith? Yaret imagined herself being instantly reported and dragged off to the castle guards. Even if she did somehow manage to get keys made, they most likely wouldn’t work. And even if they worked…

One thing at a time. The impressions might have a use even if she didn’t know yet what it was. She walked back towards the workshops. The tannery was opening up now, and a man was carrying in a bundle of hides. They would hardly notice the darkburn stench in there: tannery workers would surely get immune to any smells within a day.

And once she was a little further off, the darkburn smell was gone completely, as was its aura. When she looked behind her to the north she thought she saw the lin, in the same place as before. Strange.

Turning back she saw another one – this time in the entrance of a workshop. She stared at it, bemused. Now it was an anvil. But had it not just been a lin?

“Can I help you?” A man stepped out of the workshop and paused to hang a lantern over the lintel. She realised that this was the blacksmith whose forge Rothir had visited the other day.

“Have you always had an anvil there?” she said.

“It’s the sign of the trade. Did you trip over it? It gets moved around,” he said, and moved it again, to the side of the door. Within the forge she could see the red glow of the furnace. The warmth billowed out into the cool morning air. The man looked north, and so did she, at the silver-gold layer of cloud laid like a bolt of silk along the sky.

He expected her to be a customer. She felt in her pocket. There, underneath the spoons, was the pack of arrowheads Rothir had given her. A gift that had brought her a greater pleasure than perhaps it warranted.

“Do you sell arrowheads?” she asked. The blacksmith had not seen her or Maeneb on that earlier trip. Only Rothir and Theol had gone into the forge. As she spoke, she realised that the man had only one ear: it looked as if he had never had one on that side. No scar.

“I do. Would you like to see them?”

She went in and viewed the display glittering in the lamp-light and the furnace glow: armoury and weapons on one side, spades and hoes and chisels on the other. Below the well-made arrowheads pinned to the wall was a line of buckles on a leather strap. One of those might suit Rothir. She would have liked to give him something.

But she couldn’t give Rothir a buckle. He would thank her gravely and look alarmed. When he had presented her with those arrowheads, he hadn’t been himself. Or rather, he had been a different self, not his usual one. To give him a present would be equivalent to giving him a kiss.

That was something she had thought about last night: for the news of Huldarion’s marriage had generated a slightly febrile atmosphere amongst the Vonn. She had even caught Theol in the midst of making advances to Tiburé. What would it be like to kiss Rothir – apart from bristly? She would have liked to know, but the idea of his drawing back stood always in the way.

No, kissing him was not a possibility. She wondered now how much of her attachment to Rothir had come about in the dark, hopeless cellar of Obandiro, a desperate searching for something she could love when so much had been lost. She did not know. Love came wrapped so many ways.

Nevertheless, if she could not kiss him, she would like to be kissed by him. Sadly, that was never going to happen either. She was not the one he wanted. Rothir’s woman was waiting for him in Caervonn: a woman as soft and lovely as a rose. He’d spoken of a fantasy, not a real person, Yaret understood that: but a fantasy woman with two arms and two legs. That would do him, Rothir had said. Even though she knew that also was a throwaway remark, it did not come out of nowhere.

Rothir had saved her life, So, naturally, he felt protective towards her. But she told herself it was ridiculous to think that he might feel anything more for her – a foreign woman in drab men’s clothing, with one missing foot, a crooked nose, practically no money, total possessions two donkeys – no, forget the donkeys, they were Dil’s now, and Poda was really only hers on loan – total possessions a second-hand lutine that she hadn’t yet managed to buy strings for, and a far-off, burnt-out, abandoned farm. And Helba: that scruffy, useful little horse, a bit of joke, just like its rider. So there it was.

Meanwhile the smith was still waiting patiently.

“I’ll have a dozen arrowheads,” she said. “How much are the buckles?”

“Six drebs.”

Too much anyway. But they were fine things. “Do you do any other small ironwork like those?”

“Now and then,” he said. “Did you have anything in mind?”

She felt the wrapped spoons in her pocket. “Could you make keys, for instance?”

“I could if I had moulds or a master key to work from.”

“I see.” Would her impressions be good enough? She contemplated showing him the spoons. No, too dangerous. He would start asking questions. But why go to all the trouble of taking the impressions if she did nothing with them?

Her pondering was broken by a sudden clamour outside. There was the rattle of heavy cart-wheels, shouts and then a cry – almost a scream.

“What’s going on?” she said.

The blacksmith had put his head out of the door. Now he withdrew it.

“Army,” he said sombrely. “It’s the third time this week. I think they’re moving prisoners; not a pleasant business, but it doesn’t do to interfere. They’ve told everyone to keep out of the way.”

Yaret went to the door to look. Rattling towards the north wall was a heavy cart – but not an iron one: it held no huddled darkburn. Two men sat in it, heads bowed. She rather thought that they were chained.

She grabbed a hoe from the wall of the smithy. “Can I just borrow this for a minute?”

“What for?”

She didn’t answer. Slinging the hoe over her shoulder, she strode out of the forge and walked obliquely towards the cart, trudging head down like the labourers she’d seen plodding to their fields. She got quite close to it before looking up as if caught by surprise.

Two men, shackled. Stonemen. The tunics looked brown, not red, in this half-light, but it was obvious.

For they were stonemen without their stones. Instead, each had around his head a series of deep holes, black and dripping blood. Yaret was horrified. She herself had extracted stones from stoneman corpses, to use for the protection against darkburns – but how could anyone do that to them while they were alive?

They must be drugged, she thought. I hope they’re drugged. Ethlon or something. Lots of it. But why were they being brought here in the darkness before dawn?

“Hey! Who are you? What do you want?” It was one of the soldiers who had been accompanying the cart. Now he rode up to her, hand on his sword hilt.

“Sorry, sir,” she said, ducking away from him. “On my way to work. Didn’t see you.”

“Well, I saw you. You were over here just before, weren’t you, sneaking around the wall? What were you doing there?”

“I was having a piss.”

The blow knocked her right over. Luckily he hadn’t bothered to take his sword out of the scabbard before swiping at her head with it.

“Don’t show such disrespect, boy! I should have you up before the guards for your language to an officer, and for fouling a public place.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I thought that grid in the wall was the drain from the latrines.” She hung her head, and did not try to rise up from her knees.

The soldier snorted. “Get out of here,” he said. At that she did scramble to her feet, as hastily as she could, and hurried away clutching her hoe, her head sore and burning where he had hit it. As she ran she heard a moan come from the cart, ascending to a half-scream before it was cut off by the smack of another blow.

When she looked back the soldier was staring after her and she felt a wave of panic. What if he decided to arrest her after all? What if he galloped after her and searched her? What if they found the spoons, the impressions on the gum, and guessed what she’d been doing? If they identified her? The anticipated shame was almost overwhelming. The blight on Huldarion…

She kept her walk to a tired shamble, but her heart was thudding. She dared not glance back again until she was past the tannery. By then, thank the stars, the soldier had turned away. He was watching the other soldiers drag the prisoners from the carts, almost carrying them towards the grid. They seemed only semi-conscious.

And now someone must have produced a key, because the sudden flare of a lantern showed the soldier fumbling with the lower lock. Desperately she hoped that she had left no trace of gum around the keyholes: or worse, within them. If anything looked amiss they would immediately come running after her…

She needed to get out of sight. To ditch those spoons. What an idiot she was. Find a rabbit-hole, she fiercely told herself, a ditch, a crevice, anywhere. Just lose them! But there was nowhere she could hide the spoons unnoticed.

When she passed the smithy the blacksmith was outside the door, frowning at her. “So what was all that about?”

She handed him the hoe. “I was just being nosy, and I got walloped for it.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said, not unsympathetically. “You shouldn’t go near that lot. Do you want those arrowheads?”

“Oh… Yes, I will, please.”

The blacksmith dived into his shop. She dared not follow him in case she should be trapped in there. Instead she sauntered on, around the corner of the forge.

Here she was unseen. When she looked round in the dim light she spied a gap in the crumbling brick-work of the building, almost down at ground level. She took the cloth-wrapped spoons out of her pocket and shoved them into the hole, still in their wrappings. They were pretty much invisible; there was no more than a ragged end poking out. You would have to look hard to even notice it.

In any case there was no time to find a better place. She hurried back to the forge’s entrance just as the smith came out. From the edge of her vision she saw the soldiers still busy round the grid in the wall. After paying for the arrowheads – more than she expected – she thanked the blacksmith and walked off casually, away from the cart. She waited for the sound of galloping to follow her but none did.

Even so it took several minutes for her heart to stop thumping so persistently. The light of the rising sun at last began to streak across the land, like gold-hot iron being forged upon the anvil of the misty fields. That insistent fire, once lit, then grew and grew to north and south.

Although the track she tramped along was still deep in the chilly shadow of the city wall, and would remain so for some hours to come, Yaret felt too visible. She sped up, and was limping by the time she reached the West Gate.

“Your business?”

The guards barred her way. It had been easy to get out; but now that she was on her own, she realised it would be harder to get in. She knew how down-at-heel she looked.

“I’m a groom serving a lady of the Vonn,” she said. “A lady name of Tiburé. She’s staying with Melegan, the Master of the Keys. She bid me find a blacksmith and I was told there was one up near the north gate, so I’ve just been there.” She felt that she was gabbling and made herself stop.

“All right,” the guard said, not that interested after all, and waved her through. The sight of the newly bustling street was, for the first time since her arrival in the city, a huge relief: the crowd and hubbub made her inconspicuous. She felt almost limp with the release of strain, with the awareness that no-one here was paying her the slightest attention.

I am nobody in Kelvha, thought Yaret; I am all but invisible. I need to stay invisible. Look at me and I turn into a stone. Nothing to see. Just like a lin.