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

Chapter 39

“How do you find that which is hidden?” asked Yaret.

“I wish I knew,” said Leor. The two of them had just sat down upon a tumbled wall amidst the charred remains of Old Tanneries Street. They were taking a brief rest from the depressing job of clearing up the broken and bedraggled houses of the northern quarter.

Leor was finding it depressing, at least; even though the fires’ effects were not quite as ruinous as they could have been. Many buildings still stood, albeit without roofs and full of ash. But he was surprised that Yaret could go about the task with such apparent equanimity. She set to work as if this shattered landscape were entirely normal.

Thirty yards away, Durba and Naileb were helping a shopkeeper retrieve his wares from his ruined shop. Pewter mugs and plates, thought Leor, although they were recognisable only by their shape; for they were sooty black with not a gleam of metal.

“There is no spell for it?” persisted Yaret.

He tried to apply his mind to the query. “Well, it depends what sort of hidden thing you mean. Do you mean treasure? Because it depends on what it is and how deeply it is buried. I can find water hidden underneath the earth–”

“Well, anyone can do that,” she said, “with a couple of twigs.”

He swivelled round to stare at her. “What do you mean, anyone?”

“Anyone in Obandiro can. The children play at it.”

“In Obandiro,” said Leor, feeling slightly aggrieved, “the streets are also full of invisible hobs and lins by your account.”

“They used to be,” said Yaret. There was a tremor in her voice. And when Leor looked round at her, sitting beside him, there was a tremor in her face as well. She turned her head aside, ostensibly to brush ash off her sleeve; without success, for it merely added to the host of sooty smudges dappling her clothes.

Leor immediately felt ashamed for assuming she felt nothing. How could these ruins fail to affect her, when Obandiro had burned into far greater desolation than this place? Any pewter mugs in that inferno had been melted into shapeless lumps.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes. Thank you. I shouldn’t have started thinking about Obandiro.” She stared straight ahead, and took a deep breath. “To go back to my question. How do you find that which is deliberately hidden? Or, rather, deliberately hiding?”

“A person?”

“Possibly.”

“Again, I wish I knew. Adon is still lurking somewhere in this city, I am sure of it. I wish that I could find him. Reveal him somehow.” He stared at the thin straggle of people who were wandering past, picking miserably through the blackened spars of roofless homes. One old woman was laden with a pannier, far too big for her: she bent awkwardly under it, scrabbling in the detritus before tossing a chipped and broken cup into her pack.

“Would Adon be disguised, or hiding?” asked Yaret.

“How can I know?” He did not want to think about Adon, any more than Yaret wanted to think about Obandiro; but he recognised that she required distraction. And, although he did not wish to think about Adon, he needed to.

“I thought he was your other half,” she said. “What would you do to hide yourself, if you were in his place?”

“I cannot put myself in Adon’s place. We have grown too far apart.”

But Adon would not disguise himself as an old woman, thought Leor, nor as that frail, stooped man poking at the ashes with his stick, nor that thin beggar-boy limping over to the temple. He would not lower himself so far. Too much self-regard: no beggars for him. It probably pained Adon even to disguise himself as me.

“Very well,” said Yaret patiently. “But how can you hide yourself? Can you shape-shift?”

“Not as such. I can influence people’s perception of me.”

“Yes, I’ve seen you do that. Or failed to see you, rather. You make yourself so inconspicuous that you’re not worth looking at. But you cannot make yourself invisible?”

He shook his head. “I can make myself dissolve into the background. I cannot cause myself, or anyone else, to vanish altogether. That would take mighty magic indeed.”

“So if Adon were here, he would be physically hiding, or disguised; not standing before us in the rubble, listening unseen?”

“I would know if he were here,” said Leor with certainty, although as he spoke he wondered if it were entirely justified. “Even when he disguises himself, there is something slightly wrong. A shimmer, an unreality. But you would have to look very carefully to see it.”

“And you couldn’t do a spell to reveal him?”

He shrugged, and Yaret sighed.

“All right. Let’s get back to work,” she said, sliding off the wall and picking up her spade.

“You’re looking tired,” said Leor with compassion. “And your leg is obviously hurting. You should go home.”

She shook her head. “They need help here.”

“I’m sure that when Huldarion asked for volunteers, he did not mean for all his Riders to turn out.”

However, Leor knew that most of the Vonn lodging in the city had come to help in clearing-up. A few doors down, a chain of Riders under Landel’s direction was emptying out a precariously damaged tenement, stacking up any furnishings that had escaped the worst of the flames. Beyond them, he could see Rothir, Parthenal and Theol working with four local men: some were moving fallen rafters while the rest dug out the sodden ashes underneath. They were looking for corpses.

Elsewhere, bands of Kelvhan soldiers did a little digging too; the search for the market murderer which had previously occupied them seemed to have been called off after only a few hours. Presumably they had caught the man. So now the soldiers’ role was to move any bodies, and to deter looters. Leor could not imagine what anyone might find here worth looting.

Yaret had already got back to work on the building behind them, shifting planks of charcoaled wood, so he joined her. As she kicked aside a heap of blackened shards, Leor saw with a lurch of fear a body – though not a human, but a dog, as he realised almost instantly. A few moments later, however, they found its human owner, trapped beneath a rafter, the features unrecognisable.

Leor turned aside, sickened with himself as much as anything. He deplored his failure to defend these fragile mortals against Adon’s malignance. Why had he not been able to save them all? His attempt to raise the river, of which he’d been so proud, had been too late, too poorly targeted. It hadn’t been enough.

He called the nearest troop of Kelvhan soldiers over; then he and Yaret stood back while the corpse was moved.

“A guardian,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She murmured words which Leor recognised.

“Your Oveyn,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Yaret, you really should not be here.”

“I really should.” She began to dig again in a new spot. “I met the castle archivist this morning. We breakfasted together in a gloomy eatery beneath the city walls.”

“The archivist? Who’s that?”

“Oh, not a noble. The deputy for the Master of the Scrolls: a kind little man called Tamu, from somewhere in Outer Kelvha. He’s quite young for someone with so much accumulated knowledge. He acts older than he is, and stupider.”

“And what did you talk to him about?” asked Leor.

“Old lore. He mentioned a site quite far from here, by the sea, called the Place of Terns. Do you know where it is?”

“The Place of Terns,” said Leor. “Oh, yes. I know it. Or I used to, many years ago.” He straightened up and leant on his spade, looking out across the sea of rubble, across two centuries, hearing the slow thunder of the waves and the birds’ imploring cries. A desolate coastline. Although it had not been not uninhabited, its loneliness haunted his memory.

“What sort of place is it?” asked Yaret.

“What it’s like now, I could not say. It was nothing much back then. There was a small tribe living on the coast. They were just starting to build a temple – but nothing like this one.” He gestured at the Temple of Borgun behind them. “Much bigger, more extensive. That tribe has moved on since those days. And they’ve changed.”

“They are the people that you once told me were the stonemen?”

He nodded. “Early stonemen. Quite different then to what they have become.” It seemed a kind of slander to attach the label of stonemen to those industrious, ordinary, pacific people, so unlike their murderous descendants – the killers who now wore stones drilled right into their skulls rather than merely set upon their brows.

He watched a squad of Kelvhan soldiers march through the ruins and start to haul the body out with little ceremony, shedding ash and rubble in an untidy shower. “What did Tamu tell you about the Place of Terns?” he asked.

“Well,” said Yaret, “apparently, according to some old document he found, the tribe collected spirits. They enclosed a field full of them. Spirits of wood and stone and iron that seemed to be alive and moving one moment, and as still as wood and stone and iron ought to be the next.”

“Really,” said Leor. He remembered the reticent, self-sufficient people building their temple to the stones, close to the sea. A large array of walls and walkways. He hadn’t understood their explanations of the place. That they worshipped stones was easy to comprehend: but he had assumed they meant the four tall upright stones which they positioned in the centre of the building, where the priests had stood and droned their incantations. When he heard the people speak of the spirits of the earth, Leor thought that it was just more words for stones.

And spirits of wood… He had taken that to mean their sacred trees, brought with them on their long migration from the north, only to die in the harsh salt winds of the southern coastlands. Leor had found replacements on his travels: he dug up a few saplings, and, impressed by his own generous efforts, carried them back in a cart to present to the grateful tribe.

“What is it?” asked Yaret. He realised that he had not moved.

“I was thinking about the skeln,” he said. “Those trees up north. The ones I brought back to the people of the coast.”

“What about them?”

“They seemed to worship those trees, centuries ago. But there is one thing about the matter I don’t follow. It is such an unlikely coincidence. How did they ever discover that the resin from the skeln trees would control the darkburns? Because there were no darkburns back then.”

Yaret looked at him long and hard. “Think about it,” she said, as if she already knew the answer.

Leor tried to think. He visualised the skeln: those twisting, tough, contorted trees. Not tough enough, however. The replacement saplings that he had transported south had died eventually. And so, now, had the last remnants of the ancient skeln groves in the snowy north. He suspected that there were no skeln trees left in all the world... A saddening reflection.

Everything dies except for me, he thought, in a mixture of regret and relief. He watched the corpse being hauled out of the ruins by the soldiers. It was stiff and black. The soldiers lugged it carelessly to the entrance to the temple of Borgun, dropped it and knocked loudly on the door. Then they walked away before the knock was answered.

“They can’t just leave it there,” said Yaret, sounding distressed. She dropped her shovel and hobbled over to the temple. Her limp was quite pronounced; Leor found that it worried him.

Striding after Yaret, he soon overtook her, saying, “Don't worry. I’ll see to it.” Since the temple door remained closed he pushed at it and when it swung open he carefully picked up the corpse to carry it inside. The burnt body was unyielding yet also felt fragile in his arms. Too light.

He entered slowly, accustoming his sight to the gloom within the temple. Yaret did not follow him. The echoing space was almost deserted but for one pair of quietly sobbing worshippers.

And the priest was in there, walking along the row of blackened bodies which had been laid down before three statues that stood together at the front. The Kelvhan army seemed to have picked this building as a convenient charnel-house: he supposed it got the corpses out of the way, although he had no idea what would happen to them next. Presumably once identified they would be buried outside the city.

He laid the corpse down gently with the others and stood up to watch the priest. As he moved along the line of bodies, the young priest touched each one with more careful attention than the soldiers had shown. He was murmuring words that Leor could not hear: another species of Oveyn, presumably. There was a strong smell of incense, perhaps to counteract any odour of decay.

Although he did not appear to have registered Leor’s presence, the priest now straightened up, walked over to him and bowed.

“You are the wizard Leor,” he said.

“I am.” He replied cautiously, not sure whether a wizard would be welcome in a temple dedicated to an entirely unrelated supernatural being. Not that he himself was supernatural in his own eyes; he simply had a nature different to that of other men.

But the priest merely nodded, saying, “I am called Hokiro. You are, I believe, an ally of the Vonn, and of their chief, Huldarion.”

“Yes.”

“Their hunting-man Veron pointed you out to me. He has told me something of you.”

“Veron knows a little about me,” said Leor warily, “but not much.”

The priest swept his hand around the temple. “Behold the compassion of Borgun. We took in first the wounded and disabled: and then the lost and homeless; and now the burnt, whose bodies are beyond repairing. Kelvha does nothing for them. It throws its suffering people crusts of bread and leaves the care of them to us.”

“Indeed,” said Leor, a little stiffly, for he was not in the mood for proselytizing.

“We do the work that they will not. And yet they castigate us for it,” said Hokiro with gloomy passion. “All we ask for is acceptance by the city and its rulers. How can we win such acceptance?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

Hokiro sighed. “Long have I hoped for some sign; some token that our work is not in vain. Long have I waited for the face of Borgun to be shown before me: to see him reborn, re-awakened, and to see him in turn re-awake his people.”

“I am afraid you are to be disappointed – as far as the Vonn go, at least. Huldarion is not Borgun.”

“No. Yet I had hoped. And hope is not all gone, for here you are.”

“Me?” Leor was suddenly alarmed. “What have I to do with the matter?”

“You are a wizard. You can perhaps divine the presence of Borgun, for somewhere in this city he is hidden, I am sure of it–”

“Wait,” said Leor. “Wait. Hidden? What do you mean?”

“I have had signs.”

“Then they are false,” Leor said instinctively, before he thought again, and asked, “What signs?”

“Our statues weep,” Hokiro said. He pointed at the three candlelit statues that stood over the corpses. One portrayed a man holding a child, another a man stooped with age, and between them an upright figure with only one arm and a mutilated face. Was that a tear beneath the statue’s single eye?

“Statues weep all the time,” explained Leor. “It’s condensation on the stone. I expect it’s been made worse by the water sprayed around during the fires.”

“Our statues are of wood,” Hokiro murmured.

Leor gazed at the silent figures, wondering what to say.

“Even if I could divine some hidden presence,” he said at last, “it should not be relied on to be well-inclined, or to be the true Borgun. There is another wizard in this city–”

“Yes, I have learnt that. A deceiver. He disguised himself as the Lord Huldarion.”

“Then you know to beware of anyone claiming to be Borgun. It is likely to be the same deceiver.”

“I do not look for anyone claiming to be Borgun,” the priest said quietly.

Leor was flummoxed. “Then what are you looking for?”

“I am looking for someone who does not claim to be Borgun.”

“Well, that’s the whole city, then,” said Leor. He pitied the man, who clearly was obsessed. Why the fixation on finding hidden things? First Yaret, and now this priest… Why did they turn to him?

Because I am a wizard, he thought, and wizards can do anything, in people’s minds at least. If they only knew how limited my powers really are, they would not ask such favours. Although I raised a sea. I did that much. And with that memory his spirit surged a little.

Adon does so much evil with his wizardry, he thought, he causes so much harm and pain and desolation. That is why I have forsworn my own powers of magic.

Yet why were those powers given to me, if not for me to use? I feel them heave within me like a many-stranded voice that clamours to be heard, a surging, pushing tide as if of something waiting to be born. I am merely the instrument. My magic is like music: it is entirely separate from me, yet can only live through me. Only I can bring it forth.

The priest was still looking at him, waiting and expectant. “If you could use your wizardry to reveal Borgun, if only for an instant...”

“I’m sorry,” Leor said. “I cannot help you. I’d better go now: there is much to do.” His voice seemed to echo as if in a tomb.

I have entombed my powers, he thought. I have buried them alive.

The priest bowed his head, somewhat sadly, and stepped aside to let him leave the temple.