‘Everything will be sorted out on Darkfall,’ Soonkar had said, pulling off her boots and drawing a cover up over her. ‘In the meantime, let Barat believe what he will if it serves to get us all to safety.’
Something in his wording troubled Ember and as she let him push pillows under her head she struggled to understand what it was. But finally she could only ask, ‘You don’t think I am the Unraveller, do you?’
He had smiled at her strangely, then. ‘I doubt anyone aboard this ship shares my thoughts on this matter.’ Enigmatic words, and he had gone before she could ask him what he meant. Lying back, with the pain receding, she had marvelled that anyone could imagine that a dying young woman could be a legendary hero.
It was her appearance of course – the shock of seeing Shenavyre’s face and of realising that she was a stranger. It was clear to her now that Tareed had made the same mistake when they had been in the soulweaver’s hut. She had even named the same signs by which the Unraveller was to be recognised as Duran had done, matching them to Ember’s characteristics. But Alene had cut Tareed off, insisting that other strangers had been similarly marked. And so Tareed had finally decided that, if she was not the Unraveller, then she was a sort of herald of the hero. Ember had known too little of Keltor then to understand what had been raised and dismissed.
And had Alene believed her to be the Unraveller? She found that she could not decide. But what a strange and dark irony that the Draaka should come up with the idea that Glynn would betray the Unraveller. Anyone knowing Glynn for a second would realise it was impossible.
She thought about the signs listed in the Legendsong, which Duran had quoted on deck after Bleyd had exposed her face. Admittedly they could be made to fit her, but they were phrased so that they could mean many quite different things as well. Astrology in her world was based on this same sort of ambiguous language.
Separated from fear and pain as the lirium began to work, Ember had wondered why the idea of people imagining that she was a legendary figure so dismayed her. Maybe it was because she had spent so much of her life being revered for being beautiful that she mistrusted reverence. Or perhaps it was because the Unraveller was not just an object of worship. He or she, since seemingly it could be male or female, had a task to perform.
‘How do you feel?’ Soonkar asked. From the ruddiness of the light, she knew that it must be nearing dusk.
‘I feel a little better,’ she admitted, and realised that he had brought a tray of food. ‘I can’t, Soonkar. I would vomit.’
‘It is the lirium,’ he insisted gently. ‘It kills the appetite, but you must eat something to keep your strength up or there will be nothing for a white cloak to work with to heal you.’
Ember forced herself into a sitting position and took the tray. Then she looked at the halfman long enough to force him to look at her. ‘Soonkar, this morning when I asked if you thought I was the Unraveller like the others …’
‘I said I doubted anyone would think what I thought.’
‘But that wasn’t an answer,’ Ember said.
The dwarf’s expression changed and, for the first time, Ember noticed lines about his handsome mouth and eyes that had not come from laughter. ‘Some answers are harder to make than others, My Lady. But eat, and I will tell you a story, and mayhap that will answer your question after a fashion. At the least, it will pass time.’
Obediently Ember took a slice of kalinda fruit and bit into it. She could not bear the thought of anything more substantial. She ate it and another slice while Soonkar pulled up a chair and sat in it with a grunt. For some moments, he stared at the floor. Then he began.
‘Once there was a boy who was born as a grotesque combination of fairness and freakishness. The mother loved the boy, but the father was repelled by him. He saw the fairness of the child’s face above his stunted body as a mockery of his dreams. Eventually the father left and the woman who was the boy’s mother grew bitter and silent. She blamed the boy, and her love for him turned to indifference.’ He gave a laugh that sounded to Ember more like a sob. ‘I would have rather she hated me, for then I might have had the hope that she could come to love me again. But indifference is like a mist that cannot be fought or overthrown or conquered. It merely comes and clings and brings a deathly chill. So I ran away. For a time, I found a place with a gang. Because I was small, I could go places where the others could not. But that was almost the death of me. My comrades abandoned me during one job that went wrong, and I would have died if a night watchman had not found me.’
‘Night watchman?’ This was not a Keltan expression.
Soonkar smiled. ‘That night, before he found me, and when I thought that I was going to die, I dreamed of your face. That was the first time. I was charged, of course, once I had been dragged back from the edge of death, and I was released on a bond because it was my first offence. Soon after, I was caught again and jailed. It was a short sentence and I was released only to be caught again. Over the years the sentences grew longer. I do not know why I went on committing crimes when I had no talent for it, but one day I was part of a robbery during which a guard was killed; a night watchman like the one who had saved me when I was a boy. But I was a man now, and although I had not killed him, my companions swore that I had struck the blow. I had not, but I had taken part in framing the events that killed him and I felt myself to be guilty. So I made no attempt to defend myself and this was taken as the behavior of someone amoral and hardened. I was sent to prison for twenty-five years. You can believe that if prison is a hell, then it is a worse hell for a man of my stature. Already I was filled with hatred and bitterness and there it became worse. I existed for a year as if I were in a hole. I spoke to no one and saw nothing. I do not know why I did not kill myself. The means could easily have been found. But some bit of me would not allow it.’
‘You are a stranger,’ Ember said, and realised that she ought to have seen it much sooner.
‘I am,’ he laughed. ‘You cannot know what a paradox it seems to me that I came here, to another world, only to find that the face of my dreams was the face of a legendary beauty.’
‘But how … how did you get here?’
‘The same way that all strangers do,’ Soonkar said. ‘By water and moonlight and the Song, bound together by yearning. But let me finish my story. It is the balladeer in me. That was what I became here, and I was famous in my own way, for a time. But there I was in prison, on our world, in a black hole of despair. I felt that I had been ill-treated from the moment of my birth. I was drowning in self-pity and self-hatred, though I did not know it. It came to me very slowly that I had let what other people thought of me shape me and my whole life. In a sense, I had become what they thought, without even looking inward to see what might truly be in me. I was my father’s deformed view of me, and my mother’s pitying view, and I was the stunted misfit that the criminals saw, and the pathetic loser that the prison system saw … During the long years I spent in that prison cell, I dreamed over and over of your face. Sometimes the dreams were nightmares in which you would walk singing in a clearing in a wood and sometimes a hideous monster would fall on you and tear you to pieces. I would always feel that, when this happened, it was my fault. I began to think that the singing beauty in the dream was a part of myself that I had killed. But even so, I only ever stood and watched in horror when it happened. I could never seem to act.’
‘I have had that same dream many times, since coming here,’ Ember said, amazed.
Soonkar only shrugged. ‘Many of the strangers dreamed that dream, or some version of it. You will see it in the Scroll of Strangers when we get to Darkfall.’
‘We? I thought only women were allowed there?’
‘The actual saying is that no man of Keltor will walk upon Darkfall until the Unraveller comes, and technically I am not a man of Keltor, any more than any other man from our world. Incidentally it is that saying which causes most Song scholars to assume that the Unraveller would be a man.’
Ember shivered. ‘How could anyone believe that I could be a legendary hero?’
‘The prophecy does not say that the Unraveller will be powerful or even in good health. It only says that the Unraveller will come to free the Unykorn.’
‘But how could I free it? I have no idea where it is, nor how to rescue it.’
‘The commentaries are vague about exactly how the Unykorn is to be freed. Maybe figuring it out is part of what the Unraveller is supposed to do. The only thing they say for sure is that the Unykorn was tricked into becoming entrapped in a bubble formed of unmatter, which could only be unmade by someone whose matter had not been Sung by the Song. In short, someone not from Keltor.’
‘You do believe that I am the Unraveller, then?’ Ember accused.
Soonkar became serious. ‘Frankly I do not know what to believe, My Lady. It seems unlikely for many reasons, and yet there is no actual argument that makes it impossible. And … it comes to me that perhaps my dreams of serving you were intended to provide you with an assistant in such a fantastical quest. I would be honoured to accompany you upon your journey to free the Unykorn, wherever it may lead.’
‘Oh this is too much!’ Ember cried.
‘Probably,’ Soonkar said, a sparkle of mirth in his eyes. ‘It does sound a bit like a bad fairy tale and I fear that I am more likely to fill the role of Rumpelstiltskin than Prince Charming or Knight Errant.’
‘You are … making fun of me,’ Ember said doubtfully, her brief anger flowing away. In its place came a hollow ache and she lay back against her pillows.
Soonkar’s eyes were kind as he drew the blankets up around her neck. ‘I am not mocking you, Lady. But it is difficult for me not to feel that you are special, for you seemed like a light to me in the dark hole I had dug for myself, and it was by your light that I climbed out of that hole. You see I eventually escaped from prison into the sea, though I almost drowned when a storm came up and stopped me from reaching the place I had intended to go ashore. Instead I was blown out to sea and it seemed I must drown. I wanted to drown, in the end, I was so cold and tired and weary of life, then I heard music and, once more, the vision of your face came to me in the darkness of my soul. I passed out and when I woke, I was washed up on the shoals surrounding the Sheanna isles which are exposed at low tide, as helpless as a newborn babe.’
‘What happened then?’
He shrugged. ‘The Sheannite kelp gatherers who pulled me aboard knew that I was a stranger. They were expecting me because my coming had been seen by a young woman who would later become a soulweaver. On the journey to Myrmidor, for she accompanied me to offer herself, she explained about Lanalor’s portal and the Unraveller. Then, like many other strangers, I was given training on Darkfall to fit me for my new life as a balladeer, whereupon I took on a Keltan identity and left the misty isle again. I have not been there since.’
‘What about the Draaka and their demon hunters?’
Soonkar shrugged. ‘There was no time for it. I was on Darkfall two days after I crossed, and they can’t seem to scent strangers once they have been to Darkfall. It’s like some tracking device burns out there. Then Coralyn became powerful and began claiming that there never had been any strangers nor any Chaos spirit nor any Firstmade to be rescued.’
‘Do you believe in the Chaos spirit?’ Ember asked curiously.
The dwarf’s face became grave. ‘I believed in the Chaos spirit before crossing to Keltor, for it dwells in our world also, though there, if we speak of it at all, it is only by using simplistic and limited names for it such as evil. Chaos spirit is a better name because it is complex and ambiguous, and it allows one to think of it in complex and ambiguous terms. Oh it is hard to take seriously a term like evil, which is perhaps the reason there is so much ill in our world. It in interesting that philosophers here regard Chaos as necessary and claim that the trick is not to eradicate it, but to ensure that it is balanced by its opposite. The Void is where it belongs and its opposite belongs in the made worlds which themselves are spawned from Chaos. Only think of what you left behind and you must see that Chaos has a toehold there. Think of the cruelty and despair and the horrors reported any evening on televisions or in newspapers. Oh, the Chaos spirit exists on our world all right.’
‘And goodness?’
Another simplistic term. Here the term translates into the Song, which can also be called harmony. You must admit that the words harmony and chaos are better terms than good and evil.
Ember frowned, suddenly thinking of the dreams she had been having of people on her own world. On impulse, she told Soonkar about them and he listened intently, drawing her to describe them in full. ‘Is that what I was seeing?’ Ember asked at last. ‘The workings of the Chaos spirit on our world?’
‘It may be. It will be interesting to find what Signe makes of your dreams. Odd that the visions of our world … if you can call them that, concern people on the verge of making vital choices.’
‘That is only my interpretation,’ Ember said.
‘Yet it may be correct. Those people you saw may represent a world in crisis just as this world is approaching a crisis. I have often wondered if freeing the Unykorn here will make any difference to the hold Chaos has on our world.’
‘Go on with your story,’ Ember said, not wanting to think about the Unraveller.
‘Well, I became a balladeer and, even if I do say it, a good one, just as Signe foresaw. It was she who suggested it to me, though at the time I thought it a joke. Then I found myself on Iridom and stayed. In truth I spent a good bit of my time with men and women so dazed by pleasure drugs that I could be anything I chose. I thought myself content for a time, but then one day something happened … a young woman died … It was not my fault but all at once I saw the people who had sold her those pleasure drugs as monsters who fed off fear and cowardice and laziness. I cut myself off from my old companions and for a time I worked with a group – another sort of gang – who spent a good deal of effort trying to put the manufacturers of pleasure drugs out of business. Foolish because, where one factory burnt down, two more would spring up. I suppose you could say that I came to see that something else was required. Something that would not punish the makers of the pleasure drugs, nor penalise the people who took them as refuge from despair or loneliness or sorrow or even boredom, but which would actually negate the need for what the drugs were offering. It was then that I met the seerat. I was inspired by his interest in human nature and philosophy to delve into such things myself. It is no overstatement to say that he educated me. For the first time in my life I tried to look behind the faces people present to the world, my own included. To look at why people are the way they are. For the first time in my life, I was content.’
‘Until you met me.’
Soonkar smiled. ‘It did not discontent me to see the face of my dreams beneath your mask and veil. It was like seeing Shenavyre’s face in the first visionweaving I ever saw.’ He laughed. ‘I remember stopping in astonishment and gaping at it like a fool. I learned everything I could about her after that and eventually I concluded that, since she was dead, dreaming of her was a sign that I belonged here. I went to the ceremony in which Tarsin became Holder and his mermod was Chosen, so that I could speak of this to the soulweavers. They thought it interesting that I had dreamed of Keltor before coming here, because no other stranger had done so, but they could see no particular significance in it. Of course, since meeting you, I know now that I was obviously dreaming of you on our world. No one was more astounded than I to see your face that day outside the Redleaf white-cloak center! Except perhaps Barat wavespeaker yesterday afternoon. He is up there now reciting the whole of the Legendsong saga to himself over and over.’ His lips twitched again and, this time, Ember felt her own lips curve into a reluctant smile.
‘I guess that I ought to be glad of Barat’s mistake,’ she said. ‘I would if it wasn’t for the way everyone acts like I am some sort of resurrected god. Surely I would know if I w
as the Unraveller!’
‘Maybe and maybe not,’ Soonkar surprisingly said. ‘Scholars are divided on that question as on all questions pertaining to the Unraveller.’ There was a rap at the door and it opened, admitting Duran again, and this time Hella was with her looking pale and rather ill as well as awe-struck.
‘Unraveller, I regret to intrude,’ Duran said, ‘but there is something that you should know. I have been speaking to Barat who, as chance would have it, carried a message from the myrmidon Feyt, upon Ramidan, which was to come to me on Myrmidor. It was sent some time ago but the imprint was still in her listing. In myrmidon code, Feyt tells me that you are a stranger and asks me to seek for another myrmidonish stranger called Glynn.’
‘Glynn is my sister,’ Ember said evenly. ‘Feyt sent that message just after I left Ramidan with Bleyd …’ She wanted to tell them all of her vision of Glynn in the citadel palace at the betrothal, but there was a strange look on the myrmidon leader’s face. ‘What is it …?’
‘Lady,’ Duran said. ‘Reading the chit from Feyt made me realise that I have met your sister, Glynna, though I did not guess that she was a stranger. It was on Fomhika, but mayhap you should hear Hella’s story, for she, too, knows Glynn, and her tale precedes mine.’
‘It was my brother, Solen, who pulled Glynn from the waves,’ Hella said. ‘It was thought that she had drifted in a coracle from Fomhika, which sank, and that she then swallowed bittermute algae, because to begin with she was paralysed. Later my brother told me she was suffering from amnesia because of the algae. I do not know, even now, if this was true.’