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

Chapter 40

Another corpse was being carried in through the bright slice of light that was the door; this time by the Riders Theol and Dorac.

As they entered with their burden, Leor went out. The brilliance of daylight made him blink after the soft candlelit dusk. Without the incense, the pervasive stink of smoke and of rank river-water seemed much stronger than before. Appearances are relative, he thought. Things that were hidden become apparent in the right circumstances. The dark becomes light.

Durba and Yaret were talking nearby – at least, Yaret was talking while Durba made signs. Leor tried to interpret them, and failed. Then both the women took up their spades and began to walk towards an untouched pile of rubble. Yaret’s foot was dragging.

Leor mused idly about how he might reveal that which was hidden. He realised that he had seldom used his wizardry to find anything lost, other than an occasional key or pen: and that had simply been a matter of summoning the metal or the quill that they were made of. Not difficult. An inconsequential trifle. Hardly wizardry at all.

What about things deliberately concealed? In the past he’d tracked some stolen coins, and once a pig. That had been a favour for a farmer who had housed him. Leor had been able to spin a charm out of the halter that had held it.

But things that were hidden by their very nature, or deliberately concealed by themselves: that was something else again. Borgun, if he existed, would be wise to hide himself, thought Leor, in a city such as Kelvha. One arm and half a face. He wouldn’t last long here.

He watched Yaret climb clumsily over the pile of rubble and rafters to join Durba, who was pointing down at something. Probably another corpse. When, seconds later, Yaret called out to the Riders, he caught a note in her voice that had not been there before. It dismayed him. He began to hurry towards them; Rothir and Parthenal too were walking over to check what they had found.

It was a child. Or it had been a child, before the rafters had collapsed across it and the fire transformed it from a running, laughing infant to this part-blackened wreck. Its hand still held a ball: it moved him more than all the other corpses put together. A mistake to think of the dead child as it had once been. But, no, Leor reproved himself. It was a greater mistake not to.

Yaret straightened up and walked away. Rothir gazed after her as if undecided whether to go and give her comfort. Instead he bent to the task of disentangling the burnt lengths of wood from the child’s body so that it could be freed, while Durba looked on with a wretched face. Rothir’s face could not be read, being almost as sooty as the corpses. But his hands were gentle. Parthenal carried away the crumbling rafters.

Leor offered his help, although it was not needed. He was superfluous. Yet how many other bodies, he wondered, were still hidden in these smoking ruins? Would he not make it much easier for everyone if he could just reveal them by some spell?

He would not want to raise them as he had raised the darkburn from its pit – to lift them up with dead limbs flailing, heads flopping, shedding their load of ash. That would be horrific. But if he could somehow mark where the dead lay undiscovered, that might help.

How would they show themselves? He imagined a movement of the soot, blown in the breeze; perhaps a glimmer on the ash to indicate where life had been so recently. Life was a strange thing and left many traces.

As he waited for Rothir to remove another blackened beam, he tested possibilities, touching them with the power that lay inside him. Dormant, at the moment; but risingly swift to his summons. He was conscious of that twining flux of voices, that stream, that river, that sweeping flood, waiting to be undammed.

A spell to show the hidden, even briefly… Yes. Now he knew how. Of course. His own power seemed to tell him. It should not be so hard, after all. It was worth a try, at least.

So lift the veil, thought Leor, between your lives and our eyes. Show yourselves to us, you hidden ones. A few seconds will do.

He was aware of the power gathering in his mind, surging, spiralling like an inner whirlpool. As he both observed it and directed it, he felt again the growing exhilaration that he had felt at the making of his shallow sea. With a little more time and planning, he could have made it so much bigger. So much better. What could he not do with this force at his disposal? Why had he been determined to ignore it for so long? It was a part of him. It needed to be used.

Parthenal was asking him to lend a hand, but Leor barely heard him. He was vaguely conscious that Theol came over to carry the small corpse away; that the others bent their heads in formal sorrow: he bent his head too, but his mind was no longer on the child. He was intent on his inward self.

He closed his eyes, the better to see his wizardry. It was a pointing finger now, a hand, an arm, a shoulder, a body of will – a body far greater than his own, that stretched out to the surrounding street and in the great dam-burst of his power flooded it with magic as he had so lately flooded it with water.

The coursing of this tide of magic filled him with tingling heat. Reveal those who are hidden, he commanded: let them be perceived.

“Oh,” said Durba. “Lin!”

In his surprise at hearing Durba’s voice Leor’s eyes flew open. He saw…

What were they?

Those are not corpses, he thought, risen or otherwise. They are… small people? No. Tree trunks rising from the pavement, no higher than my waist? Maybe. Strange unimagined animals, squat and surprised? Are they alive?

If alive, they were not visible for long. They were flickering, and in the next few seconds while all the others gawped, they faded and went out. Nothing remained of them. Where they had been there were no more than tumbled stones and some little piles of ash.

“What?” said Rothir. He was staring at Yaret as if she had just grown feathers. She, in her turn, was staring at the space where one of the momentary things had been.

“They were all over the place,” cried Durba hoarsely, and then clapped her hand over her mouth in further shock. All along the street people had stopped digging to gaze around: he heard their cries and queries of bewilderment.

Yaret turned to Leor.

“Was that you? Uncovering the lin?” She sounded shaken.

“Those were lin? I was trying to uncover something else,” he said, feeling equally shaken. The tingling had gone and left him weak. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“There were dozens of them,” exclaimed Parthenal, smiling in curious wonder, and still gazing around although the strange apparitions had now entirely disappeared.

“You saw them too?” said Yaret to Rothir.

“I saw… something.” Rothir appeared dazed.

“You saw lin.”

Rothir seemed to gather himself. “I... saw something for a moment. I have no idea if it was illusory or real.”

“They were real,” said Durba. Her voice was hoarse as if from long disuse.

“Are they alive?” demanded Parthenal.

“In their own way,” said Yaret. She took a deep breath and began to recite an incantation in the Bandiran tongue.

That is a blessing or a prayer to lins, thought Leor. Is it by Madeo? Oh, Madeo, I wish that you had seen this. What would you make of it? Is this the opposite of your Oveyn for the dead?

The dead whom I failed to reveal after all... Ah, that was too presumptuous of me. The dead follow their own laws.

When Yaret had finished her recitation, Parthenal addressed her with a hint of mischief in his voice.

“You worship lins, Yaret – that’s probably why they were gathered around you.”

“What? I don’t worship them,” she said in some surprise. “I acknowledge them. What do you mean, they were gathered around me?”

“More round you than anyone,” croaked Durba, and Leor realised she was right. The greatest concentration of the lin had been clustered around Yaret.

“They recognised you,” said Parthenal, grinning.

“I doubt that. I’ve never thought that they can distinguish between people.” Yaret looked perplexed.

“Well,” said Leor, who was feeling a mixture of a certain pride and baffled disappointment, “I’m afraid that making them reveal themselves served no useful purpose after all. A curiosity, that’s all.” Why had his magic demanded to be used, if only to show lins? They were interesting enough, but hardly relevant.

“No useful purpose?” said Yaret, consideringly. “It was very useful. You may not think so, but I do. It confirms something that I have been suspecting. All these lins in one place? Durba, when we did our survey of the city, you saw no more than one per street on average, did you?”

“Hang on. What survey?” asked Rothir in a startled rumble.

“Durba has a gift for spotting lin. We did a tour of Kelvha City together, to see how many there are here.”

“What on earth for?” asked Parthenal.

Yaret shrugged. “Something to do? Actually, I really wanted to know, although it’s not easy to explain why.”

“Have a go anyway,” said Rothir. He spoke with careful interest despite his frown. Leor thought he was trying to temper his natural severity of matter.

“Well. I think that there is some connection between lins and darkburns.” She hesitated until Rothir nodded encouragingly.

“Go on,” he said.

“For a start,” she said, “darkburns attract lins. When I was travelling alone from Obandiro, I found a darkburn trapped in a trench – and I saw several lins gathered close to it.” She turned to Leor. “And the darkburn which you raised from the pit, Leor: there were lins there too, nearby. Durba saw them although we didn’t.”

Leor looked over at Durba, who had walked away to poke a foot at the nearest little pile of ash that had momentarily been a sort-of-person. It was nothing now. How could she have seen so many lins on the northern battlefield when he had noticed none?

Yaret went on. “Then once the Kelvhans brought the darkburn here and kept it under the north wall, there were far more lins and hobs in the northern quarter than anywhere else in the city.”

“That might have always been the case,” said Parthenal. “You don’t know what it was like before.”

“That’s true.”

Rothir wrinkled his brow. “But why are they here now? The darkburn has gone.”

“Thanks to you, dwarf,” said Parthenal drily.

Rothir frowned at him, all his severity returning. “I told you that in confidence.”

“You mean I guessed it,” Parthenal corrected him. “It wasn’t difficult. All that sneaking around the city with Veron? Anyway, everyone here knows, and I’ll keep your secret safe. Durba can’t hear us.”

Yaret glanced across to check that this was true before she spoke again, more diffidently.

“Well. The thing is, the darkburn hasn’t altogether gone. Sorry, Rothir.”

Leor didn’t understand what she was talking about until she withdrew a small black lump of charcoal from her pocket.

“Is that a piece of darkburn?” he demanded.

“You kept a fragment,” said Rothir. Once again he did not sound annoyed, but rather, almost resigned. “So do you think that piece of darkburn is attracting lins?”

“Just lins?” said Leor. “No hobs or woodwones?” He spoke facetiously, but Yaret answered with seriousness.

“I’m not sure there’s much difference. It’s us who give them labels. Hobs for houses, woodwones for the trees, lins by water. They’re basically all the same creature, but with different shapes.”

“Stumps and shrubs and stones… but what are they really?” asked Rothir.

“Not even the Farwth understood their nature.” Yaret looked at Leor. “You don’t either, do you?”

He felt almost shame as he shook his head. He’d never bothered thinking about lins because they impinged so little on him. They were undoubtedly magical in some fashion, as he was himself. Yet he had assumed that he could learn nothing useful about them. Did his ignorance decide their importance? Were they not of use to themselves, if no-one else?

Everyone is of use to themselves, he thought, and who am I to say they have no relevance? My magic seemed to think them worth revealing.

“All right,” said Rothir, nodding to Yaret. “Let’s say that lins are interested in darkburns. Why is that significant?”

“Don’t laugh,” said Yaret.

“I won’t, I promise.”

“I believe that lins and darkburns are related.”

“Related!” protested Leor, instantly incredulous. “I can’t imagine two things that are more far apart. The one is harmless and unseen – the other is all too tangible, and totally destructive.”

But Yaret raised her chin and looked at him defiantly.

“I disagree, Leor. In my view they are very close. In fact, I think that lins and darkburns are one and the same thing.”