The fact that his old man was in gaol need not have become public knowledge except that his mother told everybody her life story within minutes of meeting them, emptying herself before sucking their stories out of them. Parent—teacher interviews were a nightmare of mortification.
No, birds were less complicated. They didn’t lecture you about The Future or demand what Your Plans were. He had no idea what he was going to do when he left school. If he could have done anything in the world, he would have become an explorer, but there were no more explorers because everything in the world had been found by now. He would have liked to be a pilot, but his maths was hopeless and you had to get the best marks to qualify. Fair enough, too, because all those people’s lives were in your hands.
Carmen walked up his leg leaving a delicate pattern of scratching which bore a distinct resemblance to his father’s lousy handwriting. Sean reluctantly thought of the last card from the gaol. His father had told him about the comet that was supposed to be coming in a few nights. He seemed to think it was a good omen for his parole hearing. Sean’s mother said he was a dreamer and that was what had landed him in gaol. She had stared hard at Sean when she said that, as if dreaming was also hereditary.
By obscure association, Sean started to hum a dopey old Monkees song which was on one of his mum’s favourite tapes. He laughed suddenly to think of someone catching him sitting in there with all of those birds, humming Daydream Believer to himself.
Carmen climbed up onto his shoulder and fixed him with her purple-ringed gaze for a compelling moment, then she pressed her head against his cheek, crooning as if she thought he needed comforting. Absurdly, his eyes filled up and he started to cry without having the least idea why.
… the watcher withdrew, unable to bear the bittersweetness of those tears. In another world, the boy would have been a great spiritual leader, but he dwelt in a world that ignored its dreams, and the possible futures swirling around him were limited and bleak. There was only the slightest chance that he would find the single bright path that would allow the Song to shape him. The watcher became aware of a current flowing from the other world to the boy, and realised that his tears were not just a response to his loneliness but resulted from a wave of pain flowing from Keltor, to which the Song had given him access.
Is it the Song that ultimately links these worlds? the watcher wondered, even as it segued towards the source of the pain …
19
Lanalor thought to amaze Shenavyre with his power:
thus did he study the waves and currents
and learn to bend them to his will.
But the great Water was still of its own accord when the
Unykorn flew,
that it might hold the image of the Firstmade …
And Shenavyre saw not Lanalor’s might
but the Unykorn’s eternal beauty, reflected in the thralled
Waves …
LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN
The pains began again, and Glynn forced the edge of the pillow between her teeth. It was unlikely anyone would hear her through the dense stone walls of the cell, but she dared not take the risk. The force of the spasm shook her, though she had prepared herself mentally. She pressed her face hard into the pillow, trying to keep her wounded hand out of her way, and cursed the Draaka haven, mouthing every foul word she could dredge from her memory.
After the spasm faded, she wiped a sour froth from her lips.
It must end soon, she told herself savagely. How addictive could a drug be after only a few days? The trouble was, she knew little enough of drugs in her world, let alone those of this one. She had simply assumed that ceasing to take a drug on this world would have the same effect as on hers. Given the short period of intake, she had imagined some discomfort at most. She could not have guessed that her system would react so violently to its withdrawal. Impossible though it was, she felt as if she were addicted. Back home, someone trying to kick a habit would be brought down a step at a time from addiction, gradually reducing their drug intake. But if withdrawal was what she was actually enduring, and not some sort of poisoning, she had done it in one jump. Cold turkey.
The thought of jumping brought Solen immediately to her mind, and for a moment she seemed to feel him holding her tightly as when they had windwalked on to Acantha. To hear him …
‘I will not let you fall.’
But he had fallen and now she was falling, too.
Her fingertips began to tingle and she braced herself for another spasm. When it was over, she curled herself into a foetal ball.
‘On your own again …’ she sang in a ragged whisper, and wondered how she was going to face the gimlet-eyed Prime when morning came. There had to be evidence of such an ordeal, but if she could not hide it, the long terrible night would have been endured to no avail.
Thinking of the Prime, bitterness ran through Glynn’s veins at the memory of all that had happened since her unsuspecting arrival at the haven.
The first morning she had been wakened by a smiling draakira who told her that Bayard’s experiment with the darklin would take several days to complete, but that she might remain in the haven until it was done. She would have to work for her keep, though.
Glynn had eaten a hearty breakfast, despite feeling tired and sluggish, and guessed she had probably caught cold. She was also worried about Hella and Lev, who must be wondering what had happened to her. But if anything was to be salvaged from the mess of her ignorance, she must stay and sell the darklin before she returned.
When she had finished eating she accepted the invitation to remain, but told the draakira she felt exhausted and would pay for her bed in coin so that she could spend the day in it. It had been heavenly to climb back into her still-warm sheets, and she had fallen asleep immediately. Later, the same draakira brought a tray to her cell with a bowl of delicious soup and hot buttered bread. Still tired, Glynn had nonetheless felt hungry. She had eaten and, afterwards, had again slept heavily. The next morning, feeling groggier than ever, she had been brought breakfast by a young male draakira. Wolfing down a second bowl of sweetened porridge, she chided herself for imagining she was ill. People who were sick did not feel as hungry as she did!
She asked if she could wash herself somewhere. What she had really wanted to do was to run her head under the cold tap to shock the sluggishness out of it, but a female draakira, smiling all the while, remained with her the entire time while she bathed.
Glynn ground her teeth at the memory of that smiling surveillance. How amused they must have been at her gullibility.
The warm bath had made her sleepier than ever, of course, and Glynn was on the verge of asking to be returned to her room when another draakira knocked at the bathing-room door to say that the Prime wished to see her. She had presented herself to the tall draakira, who had politely but unsmilingly requested coin for the two nights Glynn had stayed in the haven, and for her meals.
Glynn had groped foolishly in her pocket, only to find it empty.
Of course.
‘What a pity. You must have dropped your coins,’ the Prime had murmured.
Baffled, Glynn had tried to remember what could have happened to them. Had they fallen out as the windwalker brought her to the surface? But surely she could remember feeling them in her pocket when she took out the darklin in the haven. Maybe they had fallen out since then – but she would have heard them drop on the stone floor.
Another spasm approached. Glynn made her body limp, and this time she let anger lift her over pain as she remembered the Prime’s kindly assurance that it did not matter. She could simply work off the price of two nights’ stay and food. She had actually been grateful to the woman. Since she had to wait, anyway, for the result of Bayard’s tests, there seemed no harm in it. She had been taken to a trembling, half-deaf old man who set her to pouring candle wax into moulds. She had worked obediently, scarcely noticing her surroundings, and in the afternoon she was taught to mix soap. The brew made her eyes sma
rt and her nose run, but even this failed to sting her mind to life enough to ask why she was being taught something when she would only be there another day.
In the evening, she had been returned to the meal room. She had eaten a stuffed and baked vegetable that tasted like turnip, and a spicy soup with herbed dumplings, for the first time in the company of the silent, dull-eyed servitors of the haven, known as drones.
In the light of all that had transpired since then, it struck Glynn forcefully that the servitors were probably not mentally deficient as she had blithely concluded that night, but were drugged as she had been. No doubt they had marched up as fearlessly and unsuspectingly as she had. But why hadn’t their families come looking for them? Unless they had and were told their son or daughter or wife had seen the light and had joined the Draaka’s followers.
Glynn railed uselessly at her own foolish rashness. If only she had told Hella where she was going! Instead, she had offered herself as a turkey to be fattened for the slaughter. There had been so many clues to what was happening, but she had not seen them. Why hadn’t she questioned her unusual lethargy and sleepiness as soon as it manifested itself?
The next day there had been more work on soap and candles, and she had not thought any more about the darklin or Hella or Ember. Another day passed and another and one morning she wakened groggily to discover she had lost count of the days since her arrival on Keltor. This troubled her vaguely, like a sneeze that wouldn’t quite come. She rubbed her eyes and felt anxious, but her mind could not hold onto the worry. She had resolved she would figure it out that night when she was in bed but, somehow, when night came again, she was too tired to be bothered.
Glynn turned over on the hard bed to lie on her stomach, reflecting that but for a chance mishap, she would probably still be cloddishly mixing ingredients for soap and shambling about with moulds. She was under no illusion that she had saved herself.
She laid her face on her arms and found it sticky with sweat, but there was no point in wiping it because it was not over yet. Already she could feel another spasm building. She told herself the last spasm had not been as bad as the others, and almost believed it.
Ironically, it had been the Prime, coming to speak to the candle-maker, who had awakened her at last to what was happening. The older woman had made a sudden gesture sideways, bumping Glynn and splashing fluid onto her hand from the jug of liquid she had been told to fetch. Instantly her flesh felt as if it were in flames and she had shrieked and dropped the jug. The liquid had not been hot, and yet it seared at her out of all proportion to the red-blistered patch it had left. Groaning, she had cradled her throbbing hand to her breasts, barely hearing the Prime telling her to stop squalling because she was not going to die. The draakira said coldly that the oil being used to scent the candles was, in its purest form, mildly corrosive but it was not poisonous. She had gone away to fetch something to ease the burning.
As the first agony receded, Glynn was left to sit clutching her swollen hand, nauseous, but also clear-minded. It was as if her head had been full of fog until the excruciating pain had acted like a stiff breeze, blowing it away. She realised anew that she had lost count of the days, and wondered incredulously how she had let such a thing happen. It frightened her to remember how little it had troubled her when she had thought of it before. What on earth had she been thinking of? She was supposed to be selling her darklin and returning to Hella. The Acanthan girl would be distraught. And why hadn’t anyone spoken of the darklin? There had been ample time for the tests to be completed.
It had taken her that long to realise there were no tests and that she had been drugged. Fool!
By the time the Prime returned, saying coolly that she had been delayed, the wound was a livid gash, weeping blood and mucus. She produced a sulphurous yellow salve which she rubbed gently into the wound to neutralise the poison and stop infection. It stung viciously. She gave the remainder of the pot of salve to Glynn and told her to use it until it was finished.
The possibility of her throwing off the drug must have occurred to the older woman, because without warning she had grasped Glynn’s chin and forced her head up, staring into her eyes. Glynn did her best to look thick and dull and, moments later, the Prime released her. ‘I have done what I can,’ she said indifferently to the candle-maker. She summoned a hovering draakira.
‘This lackwit cannot be let loose around chemicals again. I will have to think of something else to put her to. For now, return her to her cell. She is useless until the burn heals. Make sure she is fed.’
Lying in bed nursing her hand, it had not been hard to work out that the drug had been administered in the food. No wonder it was so good and plentiful. But knowing she was being drugged was no help. Glynn had to find a way out of the trap into which she had so idiotically walked. The first thing was to avoid the drugged food. It had been easy enough, when a meal was brought to her in her room that evening, to dispose of it. She had up-ended the bed under the window, climbed up on it and scooped the food onto the sill. But it was a short-term solution because she could not dispose of her food if she had to eat with the servitors. And even if, miraculously, she somehow managed to scoop it into her pocket unnoticed, she had to eat eventually.
The only answer was that she had to escape, and soon.
So easy to say, and so much more difficult to accomplish than she could have imagined.
She had not reckoned on being addicted to the drug – if addiction was what she was suffering. The pains had begun very early in the night, and they had grown worse and worse, instead of abating.
Now, watching the darkness lighten to pre-dawn grey, Glynn had no idea of how many attacks she had endured through the long night, or how many times she had resisted the temptation to try to scrape some food from the windowsill and eat it to put a stop to her torment. What enabled her to endure was the knowledge that, if she failed, within days she would be like the slack-mouthed servitors. Hell, she had been like them – a mindless slave.
She tried to figure out how long she had been in the haven. At a stab, a week, but it might be longer. No matter, she told herself. She must concentrate on the immediate future and find a way to escape. She had not the slightest doubt that she was a prisoner here. The only thing in her favour was that the Draaka’s people would assume they had a docile drone on their hands.
But escape from the fortress-like building was not going to be easy.
Her cell featured one window, but there was no climbing out of it. It was in the outside wall – the change of light and the wind gusting freely through it, fluttering cobwebs on the roof, told her that. But the window was tiny – little more than an air vent really, and up near the ceiling. It had taken all of her efforts to reach it so that she could dispose of the food.
She turned on her side, staring at the door lit by a dim shaft of moonlight that slanted through the window.
There was no way of forcing it, and precious little to force it with. The bed was a twisted wicker frame, strung with tough, plaited vines, and had a ticking mattress. The only other things in the room were a small gourd bucket with a lid for her wastes that was emptied after she left in the mornings, a ceramic jug of water with a wooden dipper, and a rush broom.
It was too reminiscent of a solitary prison cell, but Glynn told herself this was the way monks and nuns and people who went on religious retreats lived by choice when they wanted to meditate and get close to God or the ether or whatever. She even tried to convince herself that it would improve her own ability to think of a solution. The trouble was that thinking, no matter how inspired, was not going to get her out of the room, off Acantha or back home.
Another particularly savage spasm took her by surprise, and she drew her knees up to her chest and bit hard into them. When it was over, she fought off despair by reminding herself sternly of Ember’s physical suffering during the time the doctors had been figuring out what they could do for her. That had gone on for weeks. The doctors kept trying new thi
ngs and some of the drugs seemed more painful than the tumour. But it seemed to Glynn the true depth had been plumbed in her sister when they told her that she was dying. Glynn could vividly remember the look of terror on her face. She had seemed to welcome the pain after she knew the truth, because it took so much out of her that she had no energy left for fear. When they had started her on the pills, the pain stopped and Glynn had thought the fear might return. But Ember had changed. She had turned utterly inward and nothing, not even the death of their parents, had reached her. It was as if she had gone too far for pain of any kind to touch her.
Glynn felt tears on her face, and she was genuinely shocked because she cried so seldom. It always seemed to her that tears were an expression of helplessness; a kind of giving up. The last time she could remember weeping with such abandonment had been the night her parents died. She had cried then because she had known that nothing she could do would bring them back. The tears had been an acceptance that she had lost them for ever.
Now I am crying because of the withdrawal pains, she told herself. But it was not true. She was crying because she was frightened that she might never escape the haven and return home; crying because Ember might just as well be dead to her if that was so.
But even as this thought came to her, some tough sinewy part of Glynn bridled. It might feel to her as if Ember was dead, but she was not. ‘And neither am I,’ Glynn whispered defiantly.
Another spasm came and she rode it like a raft on a swollen river. This time it was definitely shorter than the others, though no less painful. Hope surged within her and she glanced up at the window, praying that a night would be enough to bring her through the worst of it. She decided she would explain her ravaged appearance away by saying her hand had kept her awake. She looked at her palm. The blistering was crusted now, drying out and healing. But if she had bumped it in the night …
Stuffing the pillow into her mouth so hard she gagged, Glynn waited grimly for the next withdrawal spasm, and then gouged her nails across the wound. Mercifully the pain was so terrible, she blacked out.