DARKFALL

At last, despairing, Lanalor understood that nothing

in the universe

was more wondrous than the Unykorn, and so he used his powers

to enter the Void in search of some new thing to offer Shenavyre.

LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

Glynn stared out over the dark sea, dazed at the speed with which things had changed. One moment she had been a prisoner in the haven and the next she was on a ship headed for Fomhika. She was free of Acantha at last and yet in a way she was more a prisoner than ever.

She looked down with a mixture of compassion and despair at the feinna sleeping in her arms.

Impossible to believe that it was only yesterday she had wakened from her abortive attempt to escape the haven to find Bayard staring at her in astonishment. Glynn had known how she must look, scraped to hell with a lump the size of a hen’s egg on her forehead. The night’s efforts had scooped her out and she simply sat there blinking at the draakira helplessly, without the energy even to attempt an excuse.

Incredibly, instead of interrogating her, Bayard had gone away and returned with a bowl of warm water and an array of soothing salves. As she tended the cuts and scrapes, she smiled.

‘The feinna has fed you visions. This is wonderful because it means it has truly formed an intimate attachment,’ she explained, swabbing the graze on Glynn’s forehead gently. ‘This,’ she gestured at Glynn’s head, ‘has happened to me, too, and more than once. I was black and blue until I found the trick of shutting the visions out.’

Glynn was hard pressed to control her expression. Relief at the older woman’s misunderstanding made her tremble.

‘Last night went even better than I had hoped it would. I was not distracted at all by the feinna.’ Bayard examined the cut on her elbow with a grimace. ‘Nasty, but in truth we are both fortunate that it sent the visions to you, rather than to me.’

Glynn did not know what to say. She had fully expected Bayard to have known of the escape attempt because of her link with the feinna, but perhaps the link did not work in quite the way Bayard imagined. Maybe whatever happened between the animal and one person with whom it had linked was completely separate from another person with whom it had formed a bond. Which explained why Bayard could believe Glynn was linked to the feinna as she was.

‘The Draaka was very pleased with me,’ Bayard continued complacently. ‘For the first time in an age, I was able to fall into a trance and properly serve as a medium for the Void spirit.’

‘The Void spirit communes with the Draaka through me,’ the elderly draakira said with pride. ‘But since my encounter with the feinna it has been difficult for me to reach the depth of trance needed, and hard to sustain it when I did. Others have had to act as a medium, but none are so receptive. The Draaka has not been happy with the situation.’ A fleeting distress passed like the shadow of a cloud over her homely features and Glynn knew, as clearly as if she had been told, that the Draaka had wanted to kill the feinna. Obviously Bayard had pointed out that her own well-being was now connected to the animal’s.

‘Last night I told her I felt very receptive, and so she used me. Fortunately my trance was deep and prolonged. The Draaka said I had served the Void spirit well.’

Glynn struggled to comprehend that the nightmare voice she had heard came from Bayard. Horrifying in a way, and yet infinitely preferable to it belonging to the sort of monsters her unconscious had produced. The older woman had to have been given a hallucinogenic to enable her to assume the persona of the Void spirit. Her words suggested that she had no memory of how she sounded or what she said when she was entranced.

The older woman had shot her a quizzical look. ‘You are not listening to me.’

Technically she did not have a headache, but she could feel one building in the tightness of her sinuses and the tense muscles clenching across the back of her neck.

Bayard nodded understandingly. ‘Put some more of the salve on the cut. I was telling you that because the Draaka was so pleased, I judged it timely to confess to her that I had withheld the sharap’n. That is the name of the drug, which drones are given. She was not happy that I had done this without informing her, of course, but she agreed it had been wisely done, given the success of the rituals. She has said that I may keep you undrugged, as long as there was no chance of your escaping.’ She eyed Glynn’s wounds thoughtfully. ‘I think that she need not trouble herself about the possibility of your escaping, though, for the link with the feinna must be stronger than I realised. I wonder how strong exactly …’

She lifted the feinna into its old position around her neck, and bustled out the door, locking it behind her. When she did not return for some time, Glynn stood and did a series of strenuous warm-up exercises to get some blood into her muscles. After a short time she was dripping with perspiration. She stopped to rub some salve on the cuts, which had begun to sting, when a faint cramp twisted her stomach muscles. She kneaded her abdomen, thinking she had probably overdone the exercises. Rather than abating, the intensity of the cramp began to increase.

With a groan, she doubled over and dropped to her knees. It felt as if something were being removed from her stomach without anaesthetic. The pulling sensation was incredibly painful. She crawled to the wall and used it to haul herself up, with the dazed idea that she was allergic to the salve, and must summon help. As she hammered on the door, the cramps became a surging pain. Panicking, she wondered if something poisonous had bitten her.

Then all at once the pain began to decrease. In moments she was panting but without pain.

Twenty minutes later Bayard returned with a triumphant expression. Clinging to her neck, the feinna was trembling.

‘It was remarkable and completely unexpected,’ Bayard said. ‘I had thought the link between the feinna and myself was an aberration and unrepeatable, but the feinna has clearly formed a link with you. There must be some reason it linked with us specifically. It seems the two links are quite separate, for I felt none of the feinna’s pain at being separated from you. That is puzzling …’

‘I took the feinna out of the range within which I can bear to be separated from it, to see how you would react. Nothing happened, but in case your field of tolerance was higher I went further. Though I felt nothing, the feinna began to show signs of agitation. It was clearly reacting to being taken too far away from you. There can be no other explanation. I do not understand how or why, but it has definitely formed a link with you. I suspected it when I saw your state this morning, but this has confirmed it.’

Glynn made no response. Could it be that the awful pains she had experienced were really the result of some sort of mental or emotional bond that had developed between her and the feinna?

‘This means that, like me, you cannot be physically separated from the feinna,’ Bayard said succinctly. ‘Your link with it is obviously a lesser link, because I could not be so distant from it.’

‘Will occur whenever you are too far away from the feinna. I do not know what would happen if you were forced apart further – perhaps the link would break, given it is a lesser or secondary link. But the feinna experiences the same pain as you. If you struggle to escape, it will suffer exactly as you do. I suspect if it were in terrible pain, I would be aware of it, but clearly the link it has with you is not connected to the link it has to me. If it died …’ She shrugged. ‘Well, we have spoken of that eventuality.’

Glynn was reeling. ‘Are you trying to tell me that I can’t be separated from the feinna, and it can’t be apart from me or you?’ Bayard merely nodded. ‘How long will this last?’

‘Possibly it will end with the birth of the feinna’s young, or at any rate the link may weaken enough to be broken without danger. That is my own hope, but it is impossible to know precisely. You are more fortunate than I was, for I had no one to explain this to me. I had to figure it out for myself. I understand how you feel now, because I felt the same, but believe me, you will become accustomed to it in time. In fact it will even serve you well, because you will no longer have to be confined to this cell once I explain to the Draaka that you are bound by the link. You will be free.’

Bayard had given her a look of reproval. ‘There is no need for melodrama. You see yourself as chained to the feinna, but think of it: if you had not shown an affinity with it, you would now be a drone. In a sense that potential for linking saved you, for after a time, the sharap’n fed to the drones to make them willing and docile causes permanent damage to their bones. That is one of my objections to its use. You escaped that fate and you have at least a limited freedom because of the link. And who knows, when the younglings are born safely, I think it very likely her bond with both of us will cease or weaken to the point where it can be broken.’

‘I do not know the gestation period of its young, but I suspect a matter of weeks. Now I must go and convey what has happened to the Draaka. I doubt you will want to repair scrolls with those hands. Use the salve if they trouble you and rest. I suggest you use this time to think well of the alternatives you have escaped, and be grateful for your link with the feinna.’

Glynn took a deep breath of the Keltan sea air, and expelled it forcefully. Perhaps because of the enormity of what had befallen her, she had slept almost at once when Bayard left her – a deep healing sleep blissfully uninterrupted by dreams, for the draakira had taken the feinna with her. Bayard had returned in the evening with the feinna, food and unexpected news.

‘The Draaka has received an invitation from Coralyn of Iridom on behalf of her son, the Holder of Keltor,’ Bayard had said, pink spots of excitement on her sagging ivory cheeks. ‘She is to come immediately to Ramidan where she will be received as an honoured guest and where she may explain her philosophies to the citadel court.’

Bayard appeared to have had no recollection that she had announced this already in her Chaos spirit persona. Chilled, Glynn had wondered how Bayard could possibly have known that the invitation was coming unless she really was acting as a medium for some other force. That the nightmarish voice might belong to something that had possessed Bayard, had filled Glynn with black dread. Until she remembered that the Draaka used darklins in her rituals. No doubt these had supplied one of their rare true visions to Bayard.

‘It would have been better if the invitation had come from Tarsin, of course,’ Bayard had continued. ‘But no harm will come to us under the Iridomi chieftain’s protection. We will simply have to be careful how we phrase some of our beliefs, lest they be perceived as an attack on Tarsin. I will have to rewrite some sections of the new scrolls …’

‘Have I not just said so? The ship which brought this message has been chartered to bring us to Fomhika. Colwyn shipmaster has said he will wait but one day here because he is scheduled as a public ship from Fomhika to the citadel harbour, and one day standing offshore from Acantha is all his schedule allows.’

‘It will be a hasty departure,’ Bayard had sighed. ‘We will have to leave very early tomorrow to reach the ship in time. The Draaka has already requested windwalkers of Jurass.’

‘The Draaka must have an appropriate entourage of draakira, and of course I will be going, for she will need to have the means of communing with the Chaos spirit during her journey.’

Confused, Glynn stammered, ‘I thought you and the feinna could not be parted.’

‘Nor shall we be. Apart from anything else, the birthing may very well occur during the journey. Since it would be painful for the feinna to separate from you, and convenient for me to have you to occupy and care for it, you will be accompanying us also.’

Glynn’s heart had lurched into overdrive, for although she had decided against Ramidan, it came to her at once that there was a soulweaver within the citadel. If she could get to the woman …

‘That very much depends on you,’ Bayard answered slowly. ‘I should like to be able to tell the Draaka that you have given your word to act as my servant and to say nothing of the drugging of drones.’

‘Why would she or you believe me if I promise that to you?’ Glynn had asked truculently.

Bayard smiled. ‘I put my faith in the feinna’s perceptions of you as one who does not lie. Of course, if you speak out, it will simply be denied and you will be set free before witnesses as a servant prone to hysteria. None will know that you are not able to go far from us because of your link with the feinna. And when you return – as you will have no choice but to do – you will be savagely punished.’

What choice had there been but to give her word, and console herself with the possibility of freedom once the feinna had given birth to its younglings? Bayard had said it would not be long before the animal reached its term. More importantly, she would at least have a chance to speak to a soulweaver.

She had been given a set of travelling clothes – a warm shawl, a long, slightly shaped grey dress, flat lace-up boots and an overdress. There was also some underwear, a skirt and loose trousers, two lightweight short-sleeved shirts, a big thin jumper and a bag in which to carry them.

It was very early when they had all emerged from the haven the next morning, both blue and green moon still showing above the luminous line of the horizon. Glynn was laden with sacks of scrolls which Bayard regarded as essential, as well as Bayard’s and her own baggage. The Draaka came out when they were all assembled in the chilly grey pre-dawn, shivering in an icy wind. Wrapped in a thick scarlet-hooded cloak lined with dyed crimson fur, you could barely see her nose. Glynn had been afraid of being questioned, but the Draaka stood for some minutes talking closely with the cold-faced Prime, who wore a thick grey cloak. Glynn assumed she was giving the woman some last-minute instructions, but when they set off, the Prime accompanied them. There were about fifteen in the party and all but she, the Draaka and the Prime wore grey draakira tunics with the red sun insignia.

It had taken them until late in the morning to reach the platform where Glynn had landed on her first day on Acantha. Jurass and a gaggle of his attendants had been waiting there to farewell the Draaka, together with the requested windwalkers needed to transport them to the ship. There had been an absurd cliff-top breakfast complete with a lacklustre performance by a shivering female balladeer. Jurass made a speech which the rising wind and snapping cloaks devoured, and then the windwalkers flew them one at a time down to the deck of the ship.

Glynn had been unable to avoid thinking of Solen, and then of Hella, wishing for the hundredth time that she had been able to contact the girl to explain what had happened. She had even asked Bayard outright if she might send a chit but had been refused.

‘Forget your past life,’ the draakira had advised her sternly. ‘For the time being, you have no access to it. Regard it as something that belonged to someone else. If the spirit wills it, you shall return to it some day.’

Glynn had wondered disconsolately if the draakira was right about resigning herself to her fate. Am I just kidding myself thinking I can get home? she asked herself.

Once they were assembled on the pitching deck of the ship, they were formally welcomed aboard by the young shipmaster, Colwyn, with grave courtesy. What he lacked in age he made up for in authority as he warned them all that they could expect a rough journey caused by a series of stormings locked into a wind cycle between Acantha and Fomhika. But he promised the weather would improve for the latter part of the trip.

Most of the Draaka’s entourage were seasick by the time his welcome had ended, for the sea was choppy and covered in whitecaps. Glynn remembered Solen being surprised that she did not suffer from seasickness and decided it must be a common malady on Keltor. Other than the Vespians, Keltans generally seemed to dislike the sea, even if they did not suffer from seasickness.

Glynn returned to the present with a start, and saw that she was alone on the deck with a rather bilious-looking Bayard. Everyone else had gone below. Obediently she followed the weaving draakira downstairs to a public salon where rooms were being allocated. The moment this was completed, the whey-faced Draaka announced her decision to retire. More than half the passengers followed her example. Those who did not take to their beds remained huddled in the salon drinking cirul and playing dice games. The large porthole shutter remained firmly closed over the glass, as if even the sight of the sea was abhorrent to them.

Bayard tried to work on the scrolls, but before long she gave up and decided that they may as well settle themselves. Glad she had never suffered from motion sickness of any kind, Glynn trailed along behind carrying the still-sleeping feinna and her clothes. The room was very small and lacked even a tiny window, being another level down under the deck from the salon, and presumably below the waterline. Glynn made a heap out of pillows and gently put the sleeping feinna on them. The little animal did not stir. She mentioned this to Bayard with some concern.

‘Its sleep is not caused by being on the ship,’ Bayard assured her. ‘It is part of the pregnancy.’

Bayard looked puzzled, then interested. ‘That is a good question. I do not know how I know. It must be that I have absorbed some of its innate knowledge along the link. I just know that the bouts of sleep enable the feinna to store energy for the birthing. Now I am going to sleep and I suggest you do the same.’

Bayard swallowed a pale, pinkish liquid from a small bottle and offered it to Glynn. ‘It is a harmless sleeping draught and will keep you from being disturbed by feinna visions.’

‘I would rather not have any more drugs,’ she said frankly, then nodded at the feinna. ‘Besides, what if it started while we were both unconscious …’

‘As you wish. But you need not worry just yet about the birthing. I will know when the time is near.’

As she readied herself for bed, Glynn sat on the feinna’s cushions and stroked the little animal’s supine form. She wanted to be free of the link that bound her to the creature, obviously, but she could not help knowing that the fear and need which she had projected when she was lost under the flagstones of the haven, and which had summoned the feinna to her aid, had probably caused the deeper linking, so in a sense it was her own fault. The animal had saved her life and surely that created a link of obligation as binding as the other linking. Even if she could, she would not leave now until the feinna had its babies. She did not know what help she could give, but she must give what she was able.

Until it was over she could make no real decisions about her own course. She must see how things transpired.

She glanced at the draakira, wanting to confess that she had no skills in birthing, but the older woman was already asleep. The muted lantern-light showed that she was sweating profusely in the stuffy cabin and, even sleeping, she looked ill. Glynn thought of her father saying seasickness was an illness with two distinct phases: the first, where you feared you would die, and the second, where you feared you wouldn’t.

Smiling a little, she stretched herself out on her own bed and almost at once she slept.

It was a muddled dream; a mad hotch-potch of her world and Keltor. At one point she was frying onions on top of a barbecue, clad in her Keltan clothes. It was terribly hot. People kept coming up and asking what she thought she was doing.

‘Each thing has its song to sing,’ the woman remarked, then suddenly Glynn was much younger, sitting on a bus with her father. They passed a field choked with weeds. There was a single horse in the field, a poor scrawny thing with withered shanks and ribs showing.

‘Whoever is responsible for this should be shot,’ he said, staring angrily back at the emaciated horse. ‘We will call the police when we get off the bus. People should not forget their responsibilities.’

Glynn felt vaguely frightened by the way her father had said that. ‘What will happen to the horse?’

‘It will die if nothing is done. Perhaps it is already too late.’ He lifted a hand, palm outwards. Glynn shrank away, horrified to see it was covered in blood. Ignoring her cry, her father reached out and smeared blood on to her cheek.

She recoiled into another dream where she was watching two policemen in uniform. They did not seem to be aware of her.

‘You have to deal with it,’ the older man said to the younger. He had a heavy form and drooping jowls, and his voice was deep like her father’s had been. A gravel voice, which she had inherited.

‘But what do I do, is the thing? I can’t just say nothing. He’ll lie and then they’ll ask me.’

‘Do what you can,’ someone whispered, and Glynn turned to find she was now sitting beside Ember’s bed in the circular room of the darklin vision. As before, the sheet moving at her sister’s throat was the only indication that she lived.

‘It iz too late. You have lozt,’ Bayard gloated in her sinister Chaos spirit voice.

‘No,’ Wind whispered and she turned again to find them both in white costumes in his immaculate dojo, practising the kata.

‘Losing or winning a battle can depend entirely on whether you can keep hope or not. Winning happens in the mind, sometimes before a single blow is struck.’

Glynn woke with a start, heart pounding. The lantern was a mere bluish glow, its oil reservoir having almost run dry. The cabin was so airless she felt as if she were being slowly suffocated. Rising, she poured herself a drink of water with hands that trembled, and drank thirstily. She added some oil to the lamp and checked on the feinna and Bayard. They were both sleeping soundly.

Determined to get some fresh air, she backed quietly into the passage, dimly illuminated by a lantern hung by the steps leading up to the deck. There was no way of telling how late it was, for there was no natural light at this level.

A man walking with his head down bumped into her and she jumped guiltily. From his rough clothing, he was a shipson. ‘Your pardon,’ he said, and passed her, going up the steps.

Glynn followed more slowly and, reaching the salon level, was relieved to find there were only three draakira playing cards. They looked considerably the worse for cirul. No longer worried about being stopped, she climbed the steps to the deck, hoping that this state of affairs would continue for the whole trip. She had been very much afraid of being interrogated by the Draaka or the Prime about Fomhika, given that it was supposed to be her home island. Perhaps they had simply forgotten in the rush of their own affairs.

Opening the trapdoor to the deck, Glynn was blinded by bright sunlight. The dark clouds that had filled the sky on their departure from Acantha had disappeared and the sky was lilac blue. Kalinda glittered on calm water unbroken by a single wave.

Glynn felt a strong sense of deja vu, for Kalinda had shone like this the first day she had stepped on the deck of the Waverider and, though smaller, this ship was very similar in design to the other. She had the eerie feeling that if she turned her head suddenly, she would see Solen going below to prepare for the landing on Acantha, and Argon white cloak striding grim-faced along the deck.

How long ago that now seemed. She had no idea where Argon had gone, and Solen was dead. Despite her certainty that the depth of her reaction to Solen’s death arose from his resemblance to Wind, she marvelled bleakly at the impact of it. Every time she thought she had found the bottom of it, there was another level. Perhaps it was natural for her to be affected so strongly, given that Solen had saved her from the sea only to die in it himself.

In a now familiar shift, her thoughts moved to Hella. She had promised the Acanthan girl that they would go together from Acantha. Hella must have waited with Lev, her hopes slowly dwindling. If only she had told the girl where she was going and what she intended. Her only consolation was that Hella might have followed her into danger had she known where Glynn had meant to go.

Glynn could only hope that, when she had not appeared, Hella went to Nema. The old woman would have been able to protect her, or at least help her leave Acantha. Of course, Glynn had no way of knowing what had happened to the girl. Nor was she ever likely to know.

Sighing, she looked across the deck to where Colwyn knelt on his platform, directing the course of the vessel by interacting directly with the sea currents, and manipulating them to move the vessel in whichever direction he wanted. The crew clustered about were like reserve tanks of energy. Colwyn would also be smothering the wave vibrations made by the movement of the ship through the waves to prevent the silfi from rising. She had gathered a good deal of the specifics of wavespeaking by listening to the Draaka’s people talk on the way to the launch point on the Acanthan surface. Their biggest fear certainly was of silfi. The marine creatures sounded as if they were some sort of gigantic sea snakes, ferocious as sharks and with several layers of teeth. They were, Glynn had guessed, the main reason for the Vespian monopoly of sea travel. Other Keltans could use ships with sails if they had thought of it, but the silfi would have destroyed them. Only wavespeakers could alter the vibrations set up in the water by their ships, rendering them invisible to the creatures.

It was warm enough for Glynn to believe Fomhika might be semi-tropical, as she had been told, though she had no idea how the weather could be so radically different between two islands only days apart. Judging from the position of Kalinda, Glynn reckoned she must have slept for about three hours. There was still a stiff breeze despite the warmth, and a burst of wind threw up spray into her face. She gasped at the coldness, and licked the moisture from her lips, before remembering about the bittermute algae. The weather was too rough for it to accumulate, but she did not want to take any chances. She spat hastily and rubbed her sleeve across her lips.

‘I thought you might have succumbed at last to wavesickness and lost me my bet,’ Colwyn said with an amused smile, coming up to stand beside her.

He grinned. ‘My crew do not believe that someone without Vespian blood can last an entire trip without trembling at the sight of the waves, or falling sick or complaining about how dreadful it is to be out on the waves. I wonder if your immunity would last you through the Turin Straits,’ he said.

Colwyn’s eyes went to the horizon and his smile faded. ‘It is a dangerous season for silfi this year. They are more restive than I have ever known them.’ He turned suddenly to stare into Glynn’s face. ‘You have an odd way of speaking for a Fomhikan.’

Forcibly reminded that she must be more careful about her accent, Glynn made herself smile. ‘How much longer before we reach Fomhika?’

‘We Vespians believe that to name a time of arrival is to court the wrath of the wavespirits, on whose goodwill we rely.’

His expression was wry. ‘Let us say that a wise man does not yearn for the blackwind.’ He glanced out to sea again and Glynn reflected that there was a world of difference between Colwyn and Carick, the shipmaster of the Waverider. Colwyn seemed more flexible, although he had been very formal and correct with the Draaka. As if reading her mind, he turned to ask if she was a follower of the Priestess, but before she could respond, a distracted look came over his features and he peered out to sea.

All at once he looked alarmed. He turned and sprinted for his platform, shouting, ‘Silfi rising!’

Simultaneously the deck pitched violently, throwing Glynn against the thick timber railing that ran around the edge of the boat. One of Colwyn’s crew cried to her to get back. ‘Silfi have an unpleasant habit of leaping up and dragging the unwary into the water.’

Glynn stared at him with horror, uncertain whether or not he was serious. She had once seen a movie in which an enraged whale reduced a ship to splintered driftwood, drowning all of its occupants. ‘Will … will they attack the ship?’

He gave her an odd look. ‘Of course not. If it came to that, we would use culva.’

Colwyn was now standing balanced on his platform, hands held out before him like a sleepwalker. Glynn wondered that he could keep his footing.

‘Get it, but don’t uncap the barrel.’ Colwyn staggered backwards as the ship bucked and skewed sideways. ‘There are only two. I think I can deal with them.’

‘What’s happening?’ Glynn asked the man who had warned her back from the edge. She was probably asking too many questions but if she was going to be killed by some otherworld Loch Ness monster, she wanted to know why.

‘Colwyn means to try to calm the brain fibres of the silfi so they will sink again,’ the man said, his eyes on his shipmaster. ‘Only the strongest wavespeakers have this ability and it will save us the expense of replacing the culva.’

‘We use it as seldom as possible,’ the man was saying, as calmly as if they were conversing in a garden. ‘The profit of an entire journey can be lost in replenishing the store from the Iridomi.’

‘But how did they find us?’ Glynn asked. ‘I thought Colwyn was keeping them away.’

‘He was. The creatures blundered into us by chance and their brain fibres were set in motion by the contact.’

The ship was butted sideways so Glynn was again thrown against the edge of the ship. Here, she caught her first terrifying glimpse of the silfi.

It was twice as long as the ship and thick as two elephants at its widest point; big enough to crush the ship in its mouth! But in form it was little more than an enormous gelid slug with pale bulging eyes on stalks like a snail’s, and a gaping maw filled with jagged teeth.

‘Ah. Not so big. We are fortunate it is a young one …’ the shipdaughter muttered, securing a small barrel with a loop of rope.

Glynn gaped at her incredulously. If this was a baby, how large was a full-grown silfi?

The other rose to the surface and the two leviathans thrashed about for what seemed to be hours but, under Colwyn’s control, they did not make contact with the ship again. Gradually their movements lost momentum.

When at last they disappeared, the young shipmaster literally staggered down from his platform, grey with fatigue. He took a long draught from a skin containing some liquid that appeared to restore his colour, then returned to his post.

On the following day they reached Fomhika. The weather had grown progressively hotter and the sea so still as to be glasslike. Glynn ventured on deck to admire the spectacular sunset created by strong sunlight against ragged edges and whorls at the tail end of what Colwyn said was the storming they had narrowly missed. The sea reflected the dusk sky like a cauldron of molten rainbows all swirled together and it was only gradually that she realised the ship was approaching a long, low, green island with pale-gold beaches. Rising up out of the sea, it looked like a mythical paradise.

Even as she wondered why she had not heard the hammering that denoted the sighting of land, one of the crew began beating out a tattoo on the mast. The passengers emerged from below deck to witness the approach as Colwyn brought the ship into a calm bay. They were making for the furthest of three long piers stretched out like slender fingers into the water of the wide bay. All three piers were overgrown with a dark lustrous creeper. There were several other ships tied up at the piers, and one which had just pulled away, tacking hard into the wind and coming in their direction.

The township was built on a slope, rising up from the beach into a natural amphitheatre. The settlement was segmented into horizontal strips by a single road running in long, flat zigzags up from the shore to the apex of the hill. From what could be seen under the weight of greenery that seemed to shroud everything with ferocious thoroughness, the buildings appeared to be made of pale stone or adobe. Higher still, above the town, more hills rose, their flat tops covered in a rippling golden crop.

The Draaka came on deck with the Prime, who regarded the island sourly. From the corner of her eye Glynn saw the Draaka’s gaze come to rest on her and suppressed a shiver. She must not forget she was constantly in danger of revealing she was a stranger, especially here, where she was supposed to be at home. She would have to be doubly on her guard.

Bayard came to stand beside her, peering out shortsightedly at Fomhika. ‘Land,’ she said with heartfelt relief. Then her face changed. ‘Well, I wonder what he has been doing here …’

Glynn followed her gaze to the ship coming towards them. Its pennants and flags were painted black and even though it was not yet close enough to see much else, there was an air of neglect about it.

‘The Nightwhisper,’ Bayard said avidly. She glanced at Glynn and took in her puzzlement. ‘You have not heard the story of Ranouf and the Nightwhisper?’

‘Ranouf was to be the next chieftain of Vespi but he broke the ship code. His brother became the current chieftain …’

‘Ranouf is the shipmaster of that?’ Glynn nodded at the bleak black ship, thinking they went in for exiling in a big way on Keltor. Argon white cloak had been exiled on Eron isle, men were not allowed on Darkfall, and now this Ranouf had been exiled.

‘Ranouf was shipmaster of the Nightwhisper,’ Bayard corrected her. ‘It is run these days by a ruffian called Sharayde. Of course it has nothing to do with Vespi now. It is a lone renegade, fulfilling any task that brings coin. It is said Sharayde has a heart as black as his ship’s pennants. No decent person steps aboard the Nightwhisper except to arrange some foul deed.’

Bayard frowned. ‘He abandoned his scheduled course for love of a woman. He should have considered the end result of his actions. But he was a man and men seldom think beyond their bodies when they fancy themselves in love. It was not the fault of the woman involved that he lost everything.’

Glynn was struck by the harshness of the draakira’s judgment. Was it enough to think only of the end result? You could only do what was right now, and hope the result would be positive, even while you accepted that it was out of your control.

The Nightwhisper had drawn level with the Waterdancer, and everyone fell silent as the two ships passed. The crew of the battered mercenary vessel looked weatherbeaten and stared across at them without expression. Colwyn and his crew averted their eyes. On the platform Glynn caught sight of an enormous black-bearded man, gazing out to the horizon.

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