The Ropemaker Read online

  Tahl gave a final, gasping shudder and came to himself.

  “What happened?” he muttered.

  “I think Meena tried to use Axtrig,” she said.

  “Yes . . . it was like that time in Lananeth’s room, only . . . where . . . ?”

  “They’ll be in one of the big sheds we came through. That’s where the main noise came from. Over there. Don’t let go of my hand.”

  Stumbling and groping, they found their way out of the courtyard. Tilja could see the outline of buildings against the starry sky, but almost nothing at ground level. They felt their way through an arched entrance and saw ahead of them the huge dark shapes of the sheds. There was no conceivable way of telling in which one Meena and Alnor had been housed.

  “Try letting go of me for a moment,” suggested Tahl. “Then grab me again.”

  Tilja gripped his collar with her free hand. Cautiously they disentwined their fingers.

  Instantly his body went rigid. As she seized his hand he gasped, shuddered and relaxed.

  “This way,” he said, and led her to the right, then left a block further on. Here they halted and tried again. The third try brought them to a shed, part of whose roof had fallen in. The air was thick with the reek of mortar dust, and the end wall had fallen clean away. Never letting go of each other’s hands, they crawled across the heap of rubble and in under the remains of the roof. Here they found themselves stumbling among sleepers who neither moved nor spoke when kicked or trodden on, but then came to a clear patch which turned out to be a path between two long rows of mattresses. By now, despite Tilja’s protecting touch, Tahl had begun to move as if he were struggling through a dense and swirling storm that buffeted him this way and that. She felt nothing of it at all, and knew it was there only by the grunting effort of his movements. Slowly he fought his way to its center and guided her hand toward the floor. Her fingers touched and closed upon the familiar rounded shaft of wood. As she picked up the spoon and slid it in under her blouse she felt all round her the shock of change, with herself the stillness at its center. Tahl sighed in the dark.

  “That’s better,” he muttered. “Didn’t think we were going to make that. Don’t let go, though. There’s still a mass of loose magic around.”

  Others were beginning to stir in the darkness. Tilja heard a familiar groan.

  “Meena!”

  “That you, girl?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just about . . . just about . . . told you it wasn’t the end. Why’s he not shown up, then? He must’ve felt that, if he’s anywhere around. Found that dratted spoon, have you? Which way was she pointing?”

  Tilja pulled herself together, and managed to re-create in her mind the feel of the wooden shaft as she had grasped it.

  “I don’t know, in here,” she said. “I think I’ve got the line, but we’ll have to get outside where I can see the stars.”

  “Give us a hand then, getting up. Just let me find my cane and things. . . . Now, where are you . . . ? Got you. Ready? . . . Thanks. Now where’s Alnor?”

  “I am here,” came the dazed mutter. “What has happened?”

  “No time for that. I was trying to use old Axtrig, remember? Tilja and Tahl have shown up somehow. But I’ve gone and let all sorts of stuff in, and someone or something’s going to come looking for us. They won’t hang around, either. We’d best be getting out of here. Only it’s that dark I can’t see a dratted thing.”

  The shed seemed still to be filled with ferocious eddies of loose magic. All round her Tilja could hear grunts and curses as the wakened sleepers struggled to rise. She shifted Tahl’s hand across to the one with which she was holding Meena and closed its fingers round her wrist, then groped forward into the darkness and found Alnor and helped him to his feet.

  “Good,” he said, steadying at her touch. “I will lead. If it is dark, I have the advantage. The door is this way.”

  Not letting go of Tilja’s left hand, and with Meena and Tahl trailing behind grasping her right, he led the way between two of the rows and then sideways toward the outer wall. It was slow going. By now most of the occupants were awake, and full of alarm and confusion, all sensing more or less strongly the storm of magic which engulfed them. Many of them seemed to have marked where the door lay and were staggering in that direction. Others were trying to shove their way toward the only light in the pitch-dark shed, where the roof and wall had fallen in at the further end, and all the time the storm of magic buffeted them to and fro. The throng around the door was apparently so dense that it was impossible to open it. People were falling underfoot, and screaming where they lay as others trampled on them, but Alnor kept his head and managed to force his way out to one side and reach the outer wall, not far from the door.

  Here they stood panting, but before they had recovered their breath a light flared just outside, shining fiercely through the cracks of the door. The mass of people fell back, not of their own accord but as if they had been forced to do so. With a snarl of wrenched timber the door burst open and a man stalked into the shed, lit by the web of fire that blazed from the many-thonged whip he carried on his shoulder. He was just as Tilja had seen him that night on the walls of Talagh, the long, wild hair, the naked torso, the jeweled belt and bracelets. Dorn. At his presence the tumult instantly ceased. The throng at the door stood motionless before him, many with mouths wide open in the screams they had started and could not finish. In all the shed, only Tilja and the three whose hands gripped hers could move a muscle.

  For a moment she too had frozen, but with shock, not the compulsion of magic. So soon! Far back in Talagh Dorn had sensed the explosion of magic and come, almost in an instant. Now, as he began to turn slowly, studying the crowd and lightly shaking his whip for guidance toward the source of power he was seeking, Tilja came to herself. He had his back to her for the moment, but soon he would be facing her, see her, and realize that she was different. What then?

  The obvious thing was to pretend to freeze like everyone else, but she knew in her heart it wouldn’t work. It was his magic that bound everyone but her. Like Silena’s beast, he would be able to sense the difference. Perhaps, as Lord Kzuva’s magician had said, he couldn’t hurt her directly with his magic, but he didn’t have to use it to get what he wanted. He was far stronger than she was. . . . No, because to use his strength he would need to touch her, and then . . . if she dared . . . No, better, suppose she tried now, when his back was still turned, when he wasn’t ready . . .

  She was still nerving herself to step forward when an enormous throaty roar shattered the stillness. Instantly the thongs of Dorn’s whip rose and streamed toward the further end of the shed. By their light Tilja saw a huge lion standing on the pile of rubble from the fallen roof and wall. Its mane stood stiffly out around its head as its mouth gaped for another roar. At the sound the thongs of Dorn’s whip seemed to hesitate, but he shook it fiercely and they surged on, writhing as if they were fighting their way against a gale.

  Move now, while all the Watcher’s powers are concentrated on the lion! Tilja let go of the others, crouched down and managed to wriggle her way through the trance-held throng until Dorn was immediately in front of her. Still crouching, she reached up and laid both hands on his naked back.

  Again, for the third time, but far more intensely than before, body and mind filled with the numbness. She felt that to-and-fro rush of powers being channeled through her. This time they almost overwhelmed her. For a moment she was blind. Her head was full of a strange, drumming darkness. She seemed to be in some other place entirely, or rather a sort of nonplace, an endless emptiness which was draining everything out of her. She willed herself to control it, to cling on to all that was Tilja, while the swirling energies sluiced past. Somewhere in that tumult she sensed Dorn himself being dissolved and carried away into nothingness. Then it was over, and she was back in the shed and scrambling to her feet, and though she still couldn’t see, this was because the light from Dorn’s whip had
gone out and everything was in darkness again.

  But the door was open, and the people in the shed were no longer gripped into stillness by Dorn’s magic. Like sheep bursting from a pen they surged out into the open and staggered away. Tilja was simply shoved out ahead of them, but managed to twist aside and wait for the others by the doorpost.

  They came soon enough, Meena instantly recognizable among the stream of dark shapes by her grunts and mutters. Tilja grabbed her and pulled her aside and Tahl and Alnor followed.

  “That’s better,” Meena gasped. “You do that, girl? I could see a bit of it, but I stuck where I was standing. Don’t let go of me again, or I shan’t know if I’m on my head or my heels.”

  “We have to get away from here,” said Alnor. “There will be more of them coming, besides the man who came through the door.”

  “That lion’s one of them,” said Tahl.

  “Where can we go?” said Meena. “There isn’t anywhere else.”

  “Wait,” said Tilja. “Over here, where we can see more stars.”

  They moved down to a wider space between the sheds.

  “There’s the Fisherman,” said Tahl. “I can’t see the Axle-pin, but it must be about there, behind that roof.”

  Tilja looked back and checked the lie of the shattered shed.

  “Then Axtrig was still pointing south when I found her,” she said.

  Alnor grunted, as if this was something he had been half expecting. Tilja remembered him talking about it outside the gates of Goloroth. And she herself felt strangely unsurprised. She knew nothing about Faheel beyond what could be learned from the story of Asarta, but of one thing she was certain. Now that she had seen it, she knew that the City of Death was no place for him.

  The others seemed to share her thoughts.

  “That man told us they weren’t too busy just now,” said Tahl. “They should have finished with the coffins—there weren’t that many. There mightn’t be anyone there. We saw them pushing the rafts out this afternoon, Alnor. It’s this way.”

  For a moment none of the others spoke.

  “Well,” said Alnor. “It would be good to be on the water again.”

  The spaces between the sheds were full of old and frightened people stumbling about in the darkness and the eddying magic. There seemed to be nobody trying to take control, or to shepherd them back inside, let alone stop and question anyone who seemed to know where they were going. So they made their way eastward, awkwardly, with Tahl and Alnor leading, each with an arm reaching back to grasp Tilja by hand and wrist, and then Tilja with the fingers of her other hand twined into Meena’s as she helped her hobble along. So protected, they could proceed erratically through the tumult, except when part of the panicking throng blundered against them and forced them apart, and whoever had been knocked loose had to stand and fight not to be swept into the same panic until Tilja could make contact again.

  Twice from all around them, and from as far as they could hear across the stricken city, fresh wails of terror rose and died away.

  “I suppose that means another Watcher’s showed up at the shed where we found you,” said Tahl.

  “Doesn’t need to be a Watcher,” said Meena. “There’s others, remember, looking for Axtrig. Just have to hope they’ve no way of finding her, long as Tilja’s got her safe.”

  “I think one of them may be following us,” said Alnor. “I am not certain, but last time I was separated from Tilja—”

  “It’s getting lighter,” Tahl interrupted. “There’ll be a moon soon. And look, that’ll be the channel they send the rafts down.”

  He was right. They had reached a strip of water, embanked with masonry. A paved walkway ran beside it. Beyond the channel, faintly visible, lay the dark expanse of the Great River. To her left Tilja could see the outline of the walls of Goloroth, and the archway through which they had entered the city. The workers who had been unloading the cargoes earlier in the night were gone. There were no lights moving on the jetty.

  They turned south and hurried along the pathway as fast as Meena could manage. When Tilja glanced back she could see nothing following. Nobody else seemed to have thought of leaving the city by water. All the tumult lay behind them.

  Now there were rafts in the channel, ready for use next day, a long line, jostling against each other, kept together by the current. At the head of the line the stone jetty reached out into the river. Seen close to, the system was very simple. The current in the channel ran out through sluices beneath the jetty, and thus kept the line of rafts in place, but the masonry was so shaped that the front raft was nudged round the corner to the foot of a shallow ramp and held there. The passengers boarded it down the ramp, the workers on the jetty poled it away and the next raft was automatically pushed into place.

  Tahl picked up a coil of loose cord and tossed it aboard the first raft, then chose a pole from the dozen or so leaning against the jetty.

  “We’ll manage from the raft,” he said. “If Tilja gets us all aboard Alnor and Meena can sit down and then she can just hang on to me while I shove us along. The river will do most of the work.”

  He was right. Again, the jetty had been carefully shaped to turn some of the current outward, and all he needed to do was to use his pole to keep the raft from scraping against it. Soon they were sweeping along beside the dark stonework, and shore and city were sliding away behind them, sharply outlined now against the pallor of moonrise.

  “Hold fast,” called Tahl. “We’re going to bucket about a bit round the end.”

  But in fact the raft barely tilted as the side current they had been using met the force of the main stream. The jetty rushed away. Ahead lay the open sea.

  “Look at that!” cried Meena.

  She was staring back along the way they had come. Tilja turned. The first sliver of moon was showing above the horizon beyond the walls of Goloroth. Right at the end of the jetty, black against that brightness, stood an enormous lion. Its shaggy mane was rimmed with sparkles of moonlight. It did not move. Its head was turned toward them. It seemed to be watching them go.

  11

  The Island

  Tilja woke, already screwing her eyes up against the blaze of light. She was lying on a hard, slanting surface that was tilting slowly, becoming level, beginning to tilt the other way so that her head was lower than her feet and she seemed to be slipping down, down, steeper now, with a rushing sound in her ears. . . . And then light spray whipped across her, drenching her face—drenching it again, for it was already wet, and so were her clothes on her upper side, and still she couldn’t force her eyes open against the glare and look around and see where she was.

  All she could remember was staring back at an enormous lion, black against a rising moon. In her mind’s eye she could see the moon sparkling on its mane. Odd. Fur didn’t sparkle like that—not ordinary fur. Except . . . yes, the cat on the walls of Talagh . . . magical cat . . . magical lion . . . She was too tired to think about it.

  But there was something else odd about the way she remembered that lion, not magical weird, like its hugeness and its suddenness and the way it seemed to be watching her, just homely odd. Yes, it was odd in the same way as the old plow horse at Shotover, the next-door farm to Woodbourne, which never looked as if it had been put together quite right; legs and body and head seemed to belong to different horses. Or lions.

  The combined memory of horse and lion pieced everything together. The lion was of course the same one that had appeared suddenly at the end of the shattered shed and roared at Dorn, and it must then have followed them down to the pier—yes, Alnor had said that he sensed something following them—but it didn’t seem to have tried to catch or stop them, it had just been standing watching them go.

  And then something had happened to Tilja herself. She was tired and she had fallen asleep, but it hadn’t been just that. The tiredness was like nothing she had ever felt before. It came as if she had been fighting, all alone, for hours and days and months and years, a
gainst an enormous invisible something, keeping it out, or sometimes, if it became too strong for that, letting it in and channeling it through and away, away, to an unknowable somewhere, and she was the only one who could do this, so she’d had to keep on doing it, hours, days, months, years, but now it was over and she could allow the great calm wave of tiredness that had built up all the time she had been fighting to pick her up and carry her along in its softness and darkness and forgetting. . . .

  But something had woken her, or she might have slept on forever.

  More fighting.

  She wasn’t ready.

  Groaning, she tried to sit up, but couldn’t. She was being held down.

  “Hello. Do you want to wake up?”

  Tahl’s voice.

  “No . . . where . . . ? what . . . ?”

  “Hold it. I’ll untie you. We didn’t want you rolling overboard in your sleep.”

  Hands moved. The pressure against her chest eased. That was what had woken her. . . .

  No, it wasn’t, but it had been there, against her chest. A pulse of numbness. Axtrig. She clutched at the place through her blouse and lifted the spoon clear of her chest. The moment the wood lost contact with her skin she felt the handle trying to twist itself round, until she let it fall back against her chest.

  The pulse of numbness came and went.

  “Meena was trying to use her?” she muttered.

  “We were just talking about it. Meena’s not feeling too well. Some people get sick even on the river, if it’s a bit rough. You can sit up if you want. You’ve got a safety cord round you.”

  Barely able to see for the dazzle, Tilja sat and stared around. Meena was lying by her side. Her eyes were closed and her face was a nasty yellowish color. Her lips were moving in silent, angry mutters. There was a dribble of fresh vomit from the corner of her mouth. Tilja forgot everything else and crawled to the edge of the raft so that she could dip the end of her head scarf in the rush of water, then crawled back and wiped the old face clean.