People from Lansaal, who could not afford the statutory fee of the soulscapers, would send their mindsick relatives to the city, in order to take advantage of guild offers, which promised free healing for those who volunteered to let trainees work on them. My first case involved a young girl, who had been paralysed by a fragment of the Fear. The healing had taken place in my tutor’s residence, all the light boles sealed from light and air. Even now, I can remember how nervous I’d been as I’d mixed the fume in Tiji’s watchful, but unobtrusive, presence. She had sat close enough to partake of the fume but did not assume an active role in the work. The girl lay, open-eyed, on a pallet at my feet, her breathing shallow. As I breathed in the potent fume, I silently invoked my guardian-pursuers, instinctively addressing the more female aspect, with which I felt secure. What would the Fear look like? Would it attack me? It seemed a soft, sweet voice was in my head, murmuring reassurance. ‘I am with you, Rayo. I will keep you safe.’
Gradually, the shapes and colours of the outside world began to fade, and I closed my eyes. The soulscape can be seen whether one is physically looking at it or not. In effect, you cannot close your eyes on it. The inner landscape of the sick girl was a silent town, its streets empty of people and littered with rubbish. I recognised the building that symbolised her own mind, because it was covered with dark, poisonous-looking lichen. All the doors and windows were covered with it. My first instinct was to call to Tiji and ask her what to do, but I thought better of it. I knew what she would say: use your imagination. Fight symbol with symbol. I approached the building and hesitantly picked at the lichen with my fingernails. It was crumbly and dusty and I soon cleared a patch of window, which allowed me to look inside the house. The girl’s soul sat upon the floor of an empty room, her face devoid of features: no eyes, no nose, no mouth. She had truly shut herself away from the Fear that had crept up upon her mind and enclosed her. I banged on the window and said, ‘Wake up!’ The girl shivered but did not change her position or appearance. I scraped frantically at the powdery lichen, all the time talking loudly, hoping to reach the frightened scrap of consciousness inside the room. ‘Look how easily it comes away. Why don’t you come and help me? This stuff is nothing really... Come on, wake up. Help me clean your house.’
As more light came into the room, it seemed the girl came into focus. I could discern the shape of her face more easily, features were becoming prominent. Eventually, she opened her eyes, got up and walked to the window.
‘What are you doing out there?’ she asked. ‘Who are you?’
I wanted to smash through the panes and hug her. ‘I am a soulscaper,’ I said proudly. ‘And I’m here to clean your house.’
‘It doesn’t need cleaning!’ The girl had a distinctly accusatory tone.
I was about to argue, but one glance up at the walls convinced me to shut my mouth. The Fear had gone. It was that simple. Joyfully, I stepped back and concentrated on returning to normal consciousness. Tiji was there to greet me, her arms around the girl on the pallet, who was trying to sit up, making small sounds of distress.
‘Don’t let this success go to your head, girl,’ Tiji said, her wide mouth pulled into a grin. ‘This was an easy one.’ Then, because I must have looked a little crestfallen, she leaned forward to squeeze my arm. ‘But well done, all the same.’
Soon afterwards, I realised just how easy that job had been. The Fear was usually inclined to assume forms of a more aggressive or elusive nature. Sometimes, it would take more than one session to root it out, never mind dispel it. But that first job is the one I remember best. It confirmed for me that I was firmly on the soulscaping path. Within a year or so, I would be ready to pass from the guild college and sent on my first scaping-range abroad. That did not mean I would be given a commission; I would simply travel from town to town, seeking work on my own. After two years, I would have to return to Taparak, and pay the set earnings figure to the guild; what I made over that amount would be mine to keep, although I was already aware that most soulscapers existed by bartering their talents for food and shelter, on the road. This first journey, with my mother, would help prepare me for the future.
After alighting, with unsteady feet, onto the eighth level, my mother led the way on foot down the curling, wide ramp which would open out on the shore. The ramp was busy that day, traders coming and going, a mountebank performing in a recess of the rock, earning oriels for his excesses. Voices shouted, animals brayed and huffed, carts creaked and groaned. Soon, the raft on which we had travelled down would be raised aloft once more, carrying passengers and trading goods up to Taparak. All these new stimuli quickly expelled the shakes of the journey down. We came to a place where the sea thrashed into a vast underground cave, and boats were moored to great iron rings in the rock. The ramp turned a corner and there was the splendid vista of the Womb of the Land ahead of us, crammed with the bright masts and sails of Lannish vessels. Carrying our bags, I followed Ushas to the quayside. There was a small community hugging the narrow strip of land between the mountain and the sea at this point; a perilous position. In winter, it was flogged by angry waves, and the marketeers and boatmen retreated into deep caves above tide level, where they lived together until the spring. Come that time, the stone town-strip would be repaired, and the Womb would be thronged with boats once more.
The quay was a forest of masts and rigging; ships of all sizes jostling together. Skinny boys in ragged trousers, torn off at the knees, leapt from deck to deck, carrying messages, cargo and luggage, or else selling whatever was portable to boatmen from the mainland, and their passengers. Groups of girls, arms linked, wearing marvellous tiered gowns of dark green, indigo and sulky, dull gold, strolled up and down the promenade, singing of stars and crystal; they were scryers of a lesser nature, who had never belonged to a guild and whose talents, my mother told me, were negligible.
I happily basked in all the colour and noise as Ushas secured us passage on one of the ferries. Once on the mainland, we would join a mule-train to Toinis - just a day’s journey - where a Bochanegran carriage awaited us. I had begun to wonder what Sacramante would be like, having forgotten how annoyed I’d been when Ushas had first suggested I accompany her there.
We boarded a small boat, along with about half a dozen other passengers. Once we were out upon the waves, all my youthful zest began to soar. I leaned into the wind, against the edge of the boat, and let the wind take hold of my hair, closing my eyes against the scent and spray. Ushas sat cross-legged with the boatman’s boy and played Conquer, with a patterned gaming-board and men of different colours. She always won at this game so, when he shouted out in triumph, I knew she must have had a soft spot for the boy, and had cheated at a loss. I turned and caught her eye, narrowing my own, smiling. She nodded back, with the kind of smile on her face where the mouth turns down at the corners. I had been practising that expression for years and still couldn’t manage to do it as well as she did. Today, we were women travelling together, soulscapers on the road, and we could conserve our power by cheating fate to others’ advantage. It is a strange code we live by.
Landfall came at Cozca, a relatively small town stuck out on a promontory, north east of Toinis. We sat down outside a tavern, in the shade of an ilex tree, and sipped at steaming tankards of bitter myrrh-broth, whose perfume clawed the throat like a drug. The land seemed so flat to me, the town so sprawling. And how wide the streets were. Soon, even before the shadows had lengthened into evening, a muleteer came to pin her schedule to the tree. Ushas lost no time in appending our mark. Tomorrow, we would ride to Toinis. A night was spent in relative comfort in a Cozcan fohndahk near the tavern, where we took a room overlooking the ilex tree. After dining, we sat out on the fohndahk patio and watched the funeral line of a local man sway past; the casket drawn on a sledge by two oxen festooned in purple ribbons. The mourners came behind, singing of holy sacrifice, by which we understood the deceased had died the Holy Death, pale as winter orchids on his last bed.
Pa
rt of my initial training had included a brief examination of the condition referred to as the Holy Death. Trainees were taught nothing more than how to recognise Holy victims and, having ascertained that a person has died from the condition, to leave well alone. The Holy, or Sacred, Death is a phenomenon found in Khalt and Lansaal, which had begun to occur - or had at least been recognised - a year or so before I underwent my scrying rite. Its origins, however, are indistinct, although the Lans and Khalts swiftly attached religious meaning to it. Strangely, analytical discussion of the subject was never encouraged among soulscaping trainees, which naturally provoked many of us to raise it with our tutors. The Taps are renowned for their rather iconoclastic tendencies regarding other people’s beliefs, so it seemed very odd indeed that we should be discouraged from debating something that should surely be analysed in detail and understood. Some of us put forward the suggestion that the Holy Death was caused by a disease, and could, therefore, be eradicated if time was spent on studying the phenomenon. Others, myself among them, thought the Deaths were the result of a state of mind, a willingness to die. Tiji reluctantly conceded that, in her opinion, it could be both of these things, and more. But she stressed that humanity needed certain, inexplicable things to maintain the health of its mindscape; the most experienced of soulscapers believed the Holy Death to be one of these things. The only place in the known world that does not produce cases of the Holy Death is Taparak itself, which surely suggests that the mind training of the Taps is responsible for their immunity. After all, even a flower-seller in Taparak can be called upon to scry, if necessary.
However, because the condition is so deeply steeped in mystic import, it is not easy to study it rationally, and Tiji urged most strongly that we never try to investigate the Holy Deaths abroad. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘that, for some, the idea of a virgin being impregnated by a ray of light and consequently delivering a god-child, is a given, incontrovertible fact. You also know what can happen to people who contest this belief! If people believe that the gods have taken one of their loved ones, they strongly resent scientific interference. Never ask to examine a Holy corpse.’
I had this in mind as the funeral party swayed past. Ushas made no comment to me, but uttered a benison and flicked a few drops of the orange wine we were drinking out onto the dust. One of the mourners noticed this and, seeing our attire and our skin colour, which shrieked Taparak loudly, came to present us with a purple lily. Ushas accepted this gracefully and thumbed the woman’s forehead. We were invited to the wake, but Ushas declined, speaking of early starts in the morning and fatigue. I was disappointed; some riotous fun might be had among the pyre trees of Cozca.
Before dawn, my mother pitched me from my bed. She was already dressed and had daubed her cheekbones with gold-green pigment to signify her rank and also that her services were engaged. I had to wear a stripe of turquoise down my nose to show I was still in training and not to be petitioned. This irked me. I had wanted to pretend and put on airs. Still, the day was sweet, fragranced by the fumes of the resin farms down-wind, the sky clear and limpid. The mules were big animals, well-muscled and fresh; much more impressive than the skinny and cantankerous beasts found in Taparak. The journey began at a brisk trot, the muleteer chanting the rhythm to the mules, as the passengers jounced up and down in their saddles; those of them untrained in the art of mulemanship jounced painfully from side to side as well. By mid-morning, we were halfway down the coast road. To the right, yellow beaches, tressed with weed, sloped away to the wrinkling sea. In a hazy distance, the dragon shapes of Bochanegran vessels, carrying merchandise east, could be seen; their masts festooned with flags bearing the heraldic devices of the merchants.
Toinis was chaos. Being a major port, a religious sanctuary for several of the most prominent cults, and home of the Trine Colleges of Alchemy, Astronomy and Word, it was always crammed with people of many different races. I saw sallow-skinned Bochanegrans, who were mostly tourists or students, tall, proud, incredibly black Deltan traders and magi, and even the occasional tow-headed Khalt, who always looked rather lost and far from home. Ushas, after paying the muleteer and, upon her entreaty, blessing the mules, dragged me straight to the docks. We spent quite a time wandering up and down, looking for the Bochanegran vessel, Swift Sprite Windheel, on which the guild had arranged our passage to Sacramante.
‘I hope there has been no misunderstanding,’ Ushas muttered, her patience fraying, as we began our third circuit of the quayside. Eventually, we resigned ourselves to queuing at the harbourmaster’s booth, where we might inquire as to the Windheel’s whereabouts. I wanted to wander off and explore, but knew Ushas wouldn’t take it well. She got bored easily and needed someone to complain to as we stood in line. Luckily, there was a Lannish family ahead of us, who had been waiting for three days for passage east to Craienic, and therefore had more to moan about. Ushas listened attentively to their complaints, offering advice.
When our turn came, my mother puffed herself up to a commanding stance and said, ‘Goodman, tell me please where I may locate the Bochanegran vessel, Swift Sprite Windheel. She is expecting us.’
The harbour-master barely looked up, but pointed over our shoulders. We turned. Through the window, we could see a stately, disdainful, high-prowed vessel nosing aside lesser boats as she cruised slowly into dock. The Windheel. Perhaps we’d arrived early.
For some esoteric reason, my body decided it had had enough of sea travel and adopted nausea for the last stage of our journey. True, a late spring hastening had risen in the winds, chopping up the sea beneath the ship into chunks, so that it seemed she bounced through the waves rather than cleaved through them. Ushas doped me up with goldpoppy elixir and virtually strapped me into a bunk in our cabin, while she repaired to the saloon and drank with the other passengers, or else played Conquer. I had never felt so ill in my life and guzzled more goldpoppy as soon as signs of alertness illumined the fuzz in my brain. Thus, by the time we docked at Sacramante, I was more in the soulscape than reality, and my addled senses had become so used to the chop of waves, I couldn’t stand on land, and vomited as soon as I tried to walk. Ushas was annoyed by this, because she didn’t want me to embarrass her. I was deposited, rather roughly, in a dockside orberja, where I sought once more the temporary sanctuary of sleep, while Ushas hired a spindly open carriage to take her to the Carmen Tricante, residence of her employers.
Later, I was sent for. A message came from Ushas to inform me that the Tricantes would not hear of us staying in an oberja during our visit, and that they had offered us the hospitality of their family home. I sat on the edge of my bed while the oberja mistress told me all this, and wondered how on earth I was going to control my rebellious stomach in the presence of Sacramantan aristocrats. But, by the time the Tricante conveyance, complete with haughty, liveried driver, presented itself in front of the building, I had bathed myself, eaten, and drunk two carafes of spring water, so was feeling much more human. The driver carried our belongings outside, me tripping behind in my best shirt and trousers. It was too warm to wear my favourite embroidered jacket, but I carried it over my arm, with the embroidery displayed to good effect. I nodded graciously at the driver as I climbed daintily into the carriage, supported by his gloved hand. This was wonderful. The whole of that visit was filled with such magicks.
Carmen Tricante was a magnificent villa, situated on a hill above the harbour, its steeply sloping gardens lush with flowering trees. I loved the way the house was taller at the front, although even at the rear it boasted three stories. There was a clutch of young people resident at the Carmen, two daughters of the house, one a few years older than I, the other, fortunately, the same age. Only two weeks parted Liviana’s birthday from mine, and perhaps because of our astral conjunction, we got along very well from the first moment we set eyes on each other. There were two female cousins, both in their late twenties, named Perdina and Voile. I think they must have been twins; they were attenuated, pallid things, who read much poetry.
Finally, there was a noisy brace of brothers, Zimon and Almero, who were of the age when life suddenly becomes hysterical and interesting. Someone who I did not see at first was the afflicted son of the household, whose name was rarely spoken. Ushas told me his name was Salyon, and that he was confined to a small pale room, set high in the Carmen. I do not think that even she was introduced to the invalid until the next morning.
That first night, we took supper in the garden, Ushas surrounded by an adoring court, relating soulscaper anecdotes: me crowded by Liviana, who never stopped asking questions. Whether it was the effects of the petal-wine we were the drinking, the fragrant night, the dark-song of Sacramante carousing the Spring evening, or just the strangeness of this life so far beyond Taparak, I felt as if I had fallen in love. My heart soared, my blood screamed in joy; I couldn’t stop smiling. Feverishly, I extolled the wonders of this magical city to my hostess. Liviana merely wrinkled her sun-tawny nose, small and straight as a child’s finger, and said, ‘It’s all so busy. I’d like to live in Taparak. It sounds so casual.’
I wondered what absurdity of fate had cast each of our souls down in the environment that the other desired. Liviana liked air, she liked heights, and made me tell her of my life among the dreys.
There is an atmosphere in Sacramante like nowhere else on Earth. Now, I understand some of what inspires it but then, as a girl, I was intoxicated and spellbound by its hectic gaiety, its intimations of secrets. The city sprawls over a number of hills; wide avenues sweep down to the sea, and there are hundreds of little alleys, where cloistered tavernas, walled in flowering vines, sell bizarre and perfumed beverages. Walking through the maze tunnels of these alleys, you sometimes come upon a cobbled piazza, where entertainers tumble and screech for the benefit of indolent beauties seated outside the oberjas, their dark-vaned fans aflap. Every day, while my mother probed the soulscape of poor suffering Salyon, Liviana and I went out into the city. Liviana wanted to show me everything, on the condition that she could visit me in Taparak later, when I might repay the favour. I was happy to comply. We were never out alone, however. Sometimes Livvy’s older sister, Agnestia, would accompany us, or else we’d have to put up with the boisterous brothers as escorts. Occasionally, one or both of the languid cousins might stir themselves to take us out. Whoever came with us, it always seemed as if we were in a crowd; I had never laughed so much in my life. There was so much to see, an almost obscene plenitude of art and culture to sample. The choice of concerts, plays, and participatory art events being staged each day was overwhelming. There was something to suit every taste; even the most outlandish and grotesque.