A Bright and Terrible Sword Read online

  ‘Roger?’ A cool hand on my forehead: Charlotte. ‘Why, you are burning with fever! Did you eat something bad last night?’

  I could not answer. Nothing on my body worked. My bladder let go.

  ‘Faauughhh – he wet himself!’ Rawnie said. ‘Roger, you stink.’

  I was glad to faint.

  Nonetheless, I did it again. And again.

  All that day, I practised. Whenever I felt strong enough to pull myself up on the side of the wagon, I leaned over it and pretended to retch. Each time there was some creature to cross into: a rabbit, a vole. Each time I crossed, my body collapsed into insensibility. Each time I returned, I was weak as an infant, not able to so much as lift my head.

  ‘He needs a healer,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘There are healers at Galtryf.’ Leo’s voice, full of rage. ‘He had best not die before we arrive there!’

  If I could have, I would have smiled. Leo wanted me alive so he could kill me.

  Someone pried open one of my eyelids. Rawnie. ‘Roger, are you still breathing?’

  ‘Leave him be, Rawnie!’

  ‘I just want to know if he still breathes!’

  I breathed. I felt strength ebb and flow in my body. I felt pain and relief from pain. I saw the sun climb high in a blue sky and sink again, until shadows were long and the moon appeared, once again waxing towards full. And I practised.

  I saw the world as a rabbit sees it, alive at ground level with a thousand rustlings and scents. I crossed into a deer, seen fleetingly as it leaped a small swift brook and dashed away. I crossed into a swallow soaring above the wagon and became so dizzy with the strangeness of flight that I had to return to my body before I fell out of the sky.

  In the evening I was too weak to leave the wagon and sit beside the fire. Charlotte tended me, putting crumbs of food into my mouth, holding the waterbag so I could drink. She stripped and washed my body, and I was too depleted to be shamed by her ministrations. That night I fell into sleep like a man tumbling off a high cliff and striking solid rock below.

  Into such insensibility it seemed that no dreams could penetrate. But one did, although it came as grey and blurry as if my vision were still affected by the blow from Leo’s gun. A figure, small, flickering – was it waving its arms? Yes. Somehow I sensed it was a girl, a child – oh, no, no …

  Katharine, the little sister I had murdered?

  But it was not. Colour flickered in and then out of the dream, reducing it to the grey tones of my sight as a moor cur. But the colour had been purple, and the girl waving her arms was little Princess Stephanie. She was crying.

  ‘Roger—’ Her voice came as from a great distance, which was true in life but never before in my dreams. Barely could I hear her. ‘She … is … almost … ready.’

  ‘Who?’ I shouted back across that unbridgeable distance. But I was not a web woman; I could not at will bridge the gulf between dreams. Stephanie did not answer me. More arm waving and then another voice, one I knew well, without body but as clear as if she stood at my elbow. Mother Chilton.

  ‘Where do they go?’ Mother Chilton asked, in the tone she had always taken with me: acerbic, slightly impatient, constantly reminding me of my shortcomings and failures.

  ‘Where do who go?’ I shouted back, but both of them had gone, the crying princess and the disembodied voice. I woke.

  The sun had already risen. The camp bustled around the wagon. I could sit up without pain, although I still felt weak. And in mid-morning, we came at last to Galtryf.

  13

  If I had imagined what Galtryf would look like – which I had not, having too many more pressing things to think of, such as torture, death and Maggie – I would have pictured a place like a slightly larger Hygryll. That settlement on Soulvine Moor had consisted of low, windowless rooms dug into the sides of low hills, each faced inside with stone and covered outside with the coarse grasses of the Moor. Peat fires had burned, and the simple furniture had been of stone or of scarce wood hauled many miles. Galtryf was nothing like that.

  ‘Is that where we’re going?’ Rawnie breathed, hanging over the side of the wagon.

  I pulled myself upright to look. Even John, roused to lethargic curiosity, raised his head and squinted ahead. Only Charlotte, nearly paralysed by the conflicting claims of desire to see her husband again and fear for when she did, took but one quick glance and sank again to the bed of the wagon.

  ‘I’m going to ask Leo about that place,’ Rawnie said, hopping out of the back of the wagon. ‘By damn, it’s big!’

  ‘You climb right back in here,’ Charlotte said. ‘And do not use such rough language, young woman.’

  Rawnie scowled, but she obeyed. She was no longer chained since there was no longer anyplace to go. Standing upright in the swaying wagon, she repeated, ‘It’s so big!’

  Big, and formidable, and ruined.

  Built atop a wide, flat tor, Galtryf rose in jagged, broken chambers and towers and grey stone battlements. Once it must have been even larger than the palace at Glory. Once it must have been impregnable, a fortress of the ancient kind I had seen in paintings at court. Once it might have been magnificent in an austere, belligerent way. Now whole sections had caved in on themselves, creating piles of rubble. Roofless walls loomed jaggedly over rooms choked with weeds. Lonely towers poked at an indifferent sky.

  A man, silhouetted against the sun, strode out to meet us. ‘You have them?’

  ‘Of course,’ Leo said.

  ‘Well done,’ he said, but it did not sound like a genuine compliment. Tinged with amusement, the comment was a tolerant dismissal of a boy who has correctly fingered his lute. ‘They are well?’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Roger has been ill. It’s not my fault!’

  ‘Nothing ever is,’ the man said. ‘Very well, go to the kitchen and get something to eat. I will take this over.’

  Leo scowled but, at another dismissive look, he stalked off. The other man came to the back of the wagon and stared at us. Even Rawnie fell silent.

  He was neither tall nor broad, and had nothing like John’s imposing size. But every line of his face conveyed command. Dark-eyed, beak-nosed, he had cheekbones like chisels and close-cropped grey hair. He looked preternaturally hard, as if he were only half flesh and the other half were carved from the granite that lay all around us. I knew instantly, as I had never known of anyone else, that he was a hisaf.

  He glanced briefly at Charlotte and Rawnie, then turned his full gaze upon me. ‘So you are Roger Kilbourne.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You have made great difficulties for us, Roger. But not for much longer. She is almost ready.’

  The same words Stephanie had said in my dream. I found my voice, although it came out almost as a croak. ‘Who?’

  He only smiled, and I hope never to see such a smile again. To the wagon driver, waiting respectfully, he said, ‘Bring them in. The south gate.’

  ‘Aye, Lord Jago.’

  Lord? Nothing in the man’s rough dress set him apart from the travel-soiled driver, and nothing about him spoke of the manners and breeding I had learned to recognize at court. The ‘lord’ strode away, and the wagon lurched forward.

  Rawnie said, ‘What a by damn piss-pot.’

  ‘Rawnie!’ Charlotte said, without hope.

  We drove for a long time, circling the ruined fortress, over stony and uneven ground without so much as a wagon track. The horse laboured and sweated. The wagon passed great open pits which might once have been rooms or perhaps outbuildings, most surrounded by the traces of crumbling walls. Finally we rounded a section of wall more intact than most, and below us lay the sea.

  I had not smelled it; the breeze blew from the land. Nor had I realized that this far out on Soulvine Moor, the coast curved abruptly inward. The eastern edge of Galtryf stood on a high cliff, with a dizzying fall to rock-strewn water below. To the south the high moors gave way to a gent
ler landscape: undulating hills, some wooded and some grassy, that descended gradually to the distant horizon. In morning sunshine this unknown country looked fertile, inviting, and empty of people. But no sunshine could make the vast decayed pile of Galtryf seem inviting.

  We passed more of the open, low-walled pits, and then under a huge gate from which all wood and ironwork were gone. Only the stone arch remained. The keep beyond the gate was a dirt courtyard ringed by closed wooden doors on three sides and a partially caved-in wall on the fourth. Here the wagon stopped. Dogs rushed to meet us and fear sliced through me, but these were merely ordinary hounds such as noblemen keep to hunt, although skinnier and mangier.

  Lord Jago said, ‘Put them in the prepared chambers.’

  Two young Soulviners pulled down the wagon back and reached for Charlotte and Rawnie. Rawnie said, ‘Don’t touch me, you piss-pot!’

  The younger man smiled. ‘I will not, young Lady Rawley.’

  Rawnie looked as astonished at the title as I was at the Soulviners’ dress. Unlike Lord Jago, these wore silks and velvets so worn that bare patches showed in the cloth and the hems trailed frayed threads. The brocade of the younger man’s old-fashioned doublet bared one entire shoulder. The once-red hat of the other drooped over his brow like a flat pancake. With their green eyes glowing bright – too bright, as if drunk on much wine – and their decrepit finery, they looked like players in some comic masque.

  Charlotte said, ‘Rawnie, get out of the wagon.’ Charlotte climbed down and held firmly to her daughter’s arm. ‘You will not separate us.’

  ‘Of course not,’ the Soulviner said. ‘And Alice will attend you.’

  A young girl, only a few years older than Rawnie, came nervously around the wagon. She, too, wore faded finery eaten with moth-holes. Eyes downcast, she dropped Charlotte an awkward curtsey.

  Fia, curtseying to Tom and me in the middle of a forest: ‘Perhaps I was a lady’s maid’. The memory pierced me, sharp as a dagger. Fia, Mother Chilton had said, came from Galtryf. She was an apprentice there before she escaped to bring the web women the terrible tidings of what went on there. ‘Galtryf poisoned her. It keeps all of its young on a steady low dose of poison until it is sure it has snared their minds. Without the antidote in the food that Fia ate every day, the sickness took her.’

  I looked again at the maid’s eyes. Too bright, too green, like the two young men. Galtryf was adept in the use of potions and drugs.

  Charlotte regarded the serving maid with bewilderment, Rawnie gazed at her with suspicion. John pulled me from the wagon and led me, stumbling in weakness, behind yet another Soulviner. The youth unlocked one of the doors giving on to the courtyard and John and I entered. Behind me Rawnie yelled, ‘I’ll come visit you later, Roger! After I see my father!’

  I did not dare turn around, lest she see on my face the knowledge that I might never see her again.

  The chamber behind the door was stone-walled and windowless, but the door was set with a barred grille that admitted some light. A narrow straw pallet with thin blanket, a bare table with one of its four legs a rough stave, an equally battered chair. Silently John unlocked the chain around my wrist and left. The Soulviner locked the door.

  For a long moment astonishment held me motionless. I was free of my captor hisaf. Why?

  Before the door could open again, I bit my tongue hard and crossed over.

  Darkness—

  Cold—

  Dirt choking my mouth—

  Worms in my eyes—

  Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

  But I could not reach the other side. I struggled in the grave – for such a long time I struggled in the grave! And then, all at once, I was back in the locked stone room at Galtryf, sitting on the floor and trying to determine what had just happened.

  It had felt like a solid wall between me and the Country of the Dead. Everywhere, or just here? Perhaps my gift was gone for ever, taken from me by soul arts I did not understand. But I did not think so. I had crossed into the grave easily enough – I just could not cross out of it. Something in the Country of the Dead prevented me from doing so. I could not imagine what it was. Such a thing had never happened before.

  But one thing was clear. I had been unchained because here I could not escape. This was how my father had been held at Galtryf and not, as Leo had claimed, by threatened harm to my dead mother. I, too, was as bodily confined as if I were not a hisaf. Did that mean that I couldn’t inhabit an animal either, nor escape the agony of the torture to come? If that were so …

  In panic I pressed my face against the window bars set into the door. The horse stood still hitched to Leo’s wagon. I pictured the well, concentrated my will—

  Flies and hunger and smells something behind snort startle tense to kick no it’s not—

  I stayed only a moment in the horse’s mind, but that moment was enough to collapse me to the floor, panting and gasping, pain lancing my head. No matter. I would recover. And my escape – pitiful though it might be – was still intact.

  Thus do we learn to be grateful for what should never have been necessary at all.

  For the rest of the day people came and went in the courtyard. I spent the time peering through the bars, learning what I could in case it might prove somehow useful. The mangy, underfed dogs slunk about. After a time the same people appeared and reappeared; either not that many lived at Galtryf, or else they did not pass through this courtyard. I saw ‘Lord Jago’, some of Leo’s men, John fetching water from the well, a dozen Soulviners dressed in the same fantastic rags as the first two, Alice the serving maid. ‘Alice’ was not a Soulviner name; it belonged to The Queendom. This place was a mockery of the royal court at Glory, which Soulvine perhaps hoped to take over when they had won this secret war and could live for ever. Galtryf was also a centre of command, lightly staffed but used as a place to dispatch hisafs and Soulviners on their missions of war. A mock court, a military command post – and what else?

  Why could I not cross over?

  The long summer twilight began. Now fewer people crossed the courtyard, and the aroma of cooking drifted on the warm air. My stomach growled with hunger. I was just about to rattle my bars and shout for food when two figures, one large and one small, unlocked my door. It was hard to see in the gloom, but the small figure carried a tray with a lighted candle.

  ‘I have brought your dinner,’ said a woman’s voice, unknown to me and yet somehow familiar.

  The man said, ‘Stand away from the door.’

  I backed up against the far wall, the stone chill at my back. Tempting odours wafted from the tray. The woman set it upon the rickety table and straightened. In the candlelight her face looked middle-aged, and almost familiar. She curtseyed to me, a graceful drooping that somehow conveyed resigned despair, the kind that has been going on a long time. She glanced timorously at the man, much older than she but still powerfully built.

  The woman said, ‘May I … may I stay and talk with Roger? About her?’

  He scowled. A look between them that I could not read, but his seemed both defiant and ashamed. He growled something under his breath; it might have been an oath. Then he said, ‘He be dangerous.’

  ‘Do you care?’ she said, but without spirit. ‘Lord Jago does not.’

  ‘Ten minutes, then.’ He left, locking the door behind him.

  The woman came closer. She raised her face to mine, and the candlelight fell straight upon it. Green eyes, like all of them, but a peculiar shade, neither emerald nor moss nor grass but only their own colour. Skin as white as her still-thick hair, small and delicate features in the lined face, a tilt to the nose …

  A black swooping dizziness took me, gone in a minute. I said, ‘You are … you …’

  ‘Yes, Roger Kilbourne. I am Cecilia’s mother.’

  14

  Did she know what had happened to Cecilia? That was all I could think of as I stared at her, unable to move or speak.

  ‘I know that Ceci
lia died at … at Hygryll. Hemfree brought her there. I know that because you followed her, and tried to rescue her, you were nearly sacrificed to the soul eating, too. I want to thank you for your attempt to save her.’

  She smiled, surely the saddest smile I have ever seen, and shame washed through me. She did not know. Not that I had brought her daughter back over, or that after a fortnight Cecilia, like all those carried back from the Country of the Dead in the arms of hisafs, had lost her chance at eternity. She now existed in no realm. I had watched her beautiful flesh melt and rot and disintegrate in the most terrible instant of my life. Cecilia’s mother did not know that, and so she stood there and thanked me—

  I could not stand it. I looked away and stabbed around in my mind for something, anything, to turn the talk away from Cecilia. I blurted, ‘I will die here at Galtryf, won’t I?’

  She could face truth better than ever Cecilia could; her life had forced her to. ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When she is ready.’

  ‘Who is “she”?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Lord Jago didn’t tell you? Or Leo?’

  All Leo had said was ‘Let him see what awaits him’, when Macon and Dick had crossed into the dogs …

  In one stride I crossed the small room and grabbed her small shoulder with my one hand. ‘Who is “she”? Tell me – not knowing is worse!’

  So softly that I almost didn’t hear her, she said, ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  She seemed to visibly gather herself together, pulling from the air sufficient courage, or will, or perhaps even cruelty. ‘You killed your half-sister, Rawley’s second child, that was born and raised in the Country of the Dead.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You threw her into a soul crossing.’

  ‘A spinning vortex, yes.’

  ‘And you thought her power – the power of a conduit between the living and the dead – you thought her power had vanished, too.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought it had been dispersed, distributed among the watchers in that vortex. I knew it made them stronger, but it obliterated Katharine.’