Keeper of the Keys Read online

  He straightened and blew out the oil lamp. Crossing to the companionway ladder which led on to the quarterdeck, he cracked the hatch cover. The chilly smells of rain and seawater swirled into the cabin as he shouted against the storm. 'Bring Moonless about. We're going to have to run northeast.'

  With the gale closing from the west, no other choice remained. Islamere's jagged shoals lay too close for safety, and no time remained to beat clear of the southernmost reefs; frustrated, concerned, Corley saw his hopes for a fast passage balked. The Isle of the Vaere lay due south.

  The captain banged the hatch and hastily secured the fastening. 'Fetch the healer,' he snapped at the steward, and without pausing to shed his damp cloak, he headed for Taen's berth.

  VII

  Dream-storm

  Gale winds whined through masts and rigging, and Moonless tossed, spray flying from her bow like foam from the jaws of a beast. Sprawled loose-limbed against the lee board of her berth, Taen Dreamweaver heard the thud and rush of seas whipped to fury by the storm. She struggled to determine whether the sensations were reality or another sequence of the nightmares which had beset her since the morning Jaric disembarked at Landfast. Yet as if her senses were locked in shackles, her mind remained in darkness.

  A hinge creaked, stiff as the door to the cottage Taen had known as a child. Orange light suffused her awareness, centred by a pinpoint of flame. A male voice called her name. Powerless to respond, she did not answer. The light moved closer, fell blinding across her face, and she smelled the hot reek of oil.

  Taen Dreamweaver,' repeated the man. Cloth rustled, very close by. 'You're right, she's not sleeping. What in Keithland could be ailing her?'

  Taen had heard that voice before. She wrestled to identify where; for an instant an image like an acid etching formed in her mind, of the Kielmark flinging chart after chart across the table in his study at Cliffhaven castle. Then the veils of delirium closed over her once more, and words bounced like echoes across the dark.

  '... something decidedly amiss.'

  Someone's fingers closed over Taen's wrist. Shapes slashed her awareness, inspired by a presence edged and dangerous as sword steel. The Dreamweaver cried out from the depths of trance. Gasping, she at last perceived that the person who touched her was no nightmare born of a troubled mind but solid flesh and blood. His concern pierced the depths of her until her dream-sense rang with echoes. The grip shifted on her arm, transferring her limp weight into the care of another whose self was a warm muddle of worry. A cup brushed Taen's lips. Stinging liquid ran down her throat. She stirred and choked, but after a moment the elixir cleared her mind. Taen quivered and opened her eyes.

  Awash in a flood of lanternlight, she saw faces crowded against the low beams of the cabin: the wrinkled visage of the healer, the cabin steward's bald head, and the Kielmark's bearded captain, salt-streaked and mettlesome, the violence of character which had prompted her vision of swords held flawlessly in check.

  Corley spoke before the others could react. 'Kor's grace, she's come to.' His hands pressed deep into the blankets by the Dreamweaver's side as he leaned close, openly ignoring the healer's request to give her space and air. 'Girl, what ails you?'

  'No ordinary sickness, that's certain,' snapped the healer from behind. 'Let me through.'

  Corley waved him silent. 'Taen?'

  'I don't know.' Dizzy and confused, the Dreamweaver wished she sounded less like a lost child. 'My dream-sense seems overturned. I have visions ...' Her voice trailed off, and she was terrified by her own words. What-had happened to her mastery? Yet the fear cleared her mind a little. Her voice became stronger. 'Corley, whatever happens, take me to the enchanted isle. Tamlin of the Vaere will know how to help.'

  'You'll get there.' Corley straightened with an expression unexpectedly grim. He left the bedside abruptly and ducked through the companionway, but not before Taen sensed his thought: how could he tell her that an out-of-season storm had diverted the brigantine's course due north?

  Relieved of the captain's bothersome presence, the healer jutted his bearded chin and took charge. 'Out!' he snapped at the cabin steward. 'The child needs no gawkers hanging about.'

  Taen stirred as he chivvied the steward past the bulkhead. 'I don't mind,' she said.

  'Oh, sure.' The healer thumped his satchel of remedies on the sea chest in the corner and testily shook his head. 'You'll be that much better without yon gossip poking his nose into corners.'

  The elder arranged his brazier on a slate. The shuddering toss of the brigantine appeared to cause him no difficulty, for he spilled none of his phials as he concocted a bitter-smelling potion of herbs. Taen drank the mixture with heroic distaste, at which point the steward reappeared with a tray of hot soup. The healer admitted him grumbling, and lingered to make certain she ate. At last he packed up his satchel and left. Taen slept. For several days no dreams returned to trouble her.

  But the storm grew worse. The wind reached gale force, screaming like a demon out of the west, and battering the wave crests into streaming tails of spindrift. Stripped to bare spars, Moonless reeled and tossed, seawater rolling green through her waist. The off-watch crew huddled wet as seals in the forecastle. Lashed beside the helmsmen, Corley oversaw his command night and day from the quarterdeck. Taen learned to disregard the monotonous clang of the bilge pumps. She ate cold fare with the crew; seas were too rough to permit any fire in the galley, and, lacking that central place of warmth, the brigantine became dank and cheerless below decks. Still, Taen was a fisherman's daughter. Inured to the discomforts and the perils of the sea, she badgered the sailhands until they laughed, and put red pepper in the cook's jerky so he would stop carping about the fact that his food was never hot. Watching her bright spirits light the brigantine from stem to stern, not even the healer guessed her dizzy spells had returned. Taen fought to stay active. Burning resources and wit like festival candles, she knew if she returned to her berth to sleep, the dreams would overwhelm her once again.

  But a morning arrived two days later when the dawn watch entered the galley dripping rainwater. They shouted coarse jokes about wet weather causing ringlets, and one by one fell silent as they noticed Taen sprawled against the woodbox, her skin dry and burning to the touch. Neither noise nor shaking could rouse her.

  'Inform the captain,' snapped the boatswain.

  Dragged unceremoniously from his hammock, the healer rammed a path through the gawking crewmen to Taen's side and found Corley newly arrived from the quarterdeck.

  Unkempt from ceaseless exposure to wind and water, the captain paced until he heard the healer's prognosis: this time the girl had drifted too far for mortal efforts to avail. Her cure, if any existed, lay with the Vaere.

  'See her to a berth.' Corley shut red-rimmed eyes, for a moment overcome by fatigue. Then he shivered like a dog and added, 'Storm's lifting. By daylight we should be able to put about and resume a southern course.'

  But weather balked his plans again by midday. The heavy clouds broke, replaced by a sky the clean cobalt of enamel. Capricious winds shifted and winnowed and stilled. Moonless wallowed becalmed over a round-topped procession of storm swells. Her gear crashed and banged aloft, and the smoke from her galley fire rose straight as a spire overhead. Silent, Corley took sun sights and consulted his charts. Tempest and current had set Moonless far to the east and north, leagues from her desired course. The Isle of Vaere presently was twenty days' sail under perfect conditions; but without wind for her canvas, the brigantine rolled dead as a gaffed fish in the water. Suddenly sensitive to every ache in his tired body, the captain laid his dividers aside and bellowed for the officer of the watch.

  The man arrived tardily. Curt to the point of rudeness, Corley demanded the reason, and received a second round of ill news. Inspection of the hold revealed casks worked loose by the storm; most of the water stores had been fouled with seawater.

  As the officer delivered his report, Corley resisted a consuming urge to cover his face with h
is hands. Moonless would need to make landfall within eight days to take on water, else the crew would suffer shortage. Kor defend the innocent, thought Corley; the girl who had kept his sailhands grinning through a bout of the most evil weather he had seen on the Corine Sea would now have to wait on more than the wind for help.

  * * *

  Taen never felt the hands which lifted her from the galley deck and carried her, wrapped in blankets, to the narrow berth in the aft cabin. Lost in a maze of dreams, she knew nothing of the healer's attempts to rouse her, nor did she react to the thumps and shouted commands from the hold where the sailhands laboured to secure the ruined casks. Her mind assumed a course all its own. Personalities deflected her, temporarily flooding swirls of colour and dimension across her inward eye; then they passed, and the images ran together into a world of twilight and shadows. Taen drifted, time and self forgotten.

  Later the light faded entirely. Muffled in night like felt.

  Taen sailed through an eddyless void. Neither moon nor stars pricked the depths, and no lantern shone to mark any haven or dooryard where she might find peace and rest. How long she drifted could not be measured, but imperceptibly, the quality of the blackness changed. She perceived a spark of illumination. Distant, but warm as candle flame the light drew her like a moth.

  Blindness lifted from Taen's dream-sense. She found her awareness centred in a dusty attic chamber stacked with books. There afternoon shadow streaked a copy table where Jaric bent over parchment and a scroll with handles of gold-stamped wood. A brief shiver gripped him. Though the room was neither cold nor dark, he paused, laid his pen aside, and reached with ink-stained fingers for the striker to ignite the oil lamp.

  'Never mind, boy.' A scribe with rumpled silver hair shuffled out from behind a row of shelves. 'No sense burning lights, now. If your eyes are tired, you can finish translating that treatise in the morning.'

  Jaric rubbed a crick in his neck. 'You don't mind. Brother Handred?'

  The elder unhooked his cane from a chairback and limped across the chamber. Through dust-streaked cuffs and an assortment of ancient food stains, Taen saw that he wore the deep blue robe of Kor's Brotherhood. 'The master in residence told me you stayed all night.'

  'I was reading,' Jaric admitted. 'I didn't start copying until dawn.'

  'Well, then you're plenty tired.' Head cocked like a bird, the priest thumbed through the pages piled at Jaric's elbow. The script was clean and straight, and probably without errors; whatever the scarred state of his hands, this boy had been trained well. 'You've done enough for one day.'

  Taen felt the ache of Jaric's weariness cut through the dream-link as he rose to his feet. 'I can go?'

  The priest nodded. 'Eat. Get some sleep. You'll work the better for it come morning.'

  But rest never entered Jaric's mind as he pushed back his stool and picked a path through the stacks to the door. The boy Moonless had delivered to Landfast was changing, Taen perceived. The teaching of Corley and another swordsman called Brith had bent Jaric's mind towards a mould which accepted no excuse for weakness. More and more, necessity forced him to set aside the fears which had poisoned his childhood at Morbrith. He remembered to buckle on sword and dagger before he entered the streets. Now better acquainted with Landfast, Jaric chose back streets and alleys least travelled. Within minutes he reached the dockside.

  'Alms, young master,' called a one-handed beggar who leaned on a bollard. A mangy tomcat crouched by his feet, and clothes already patched shapeless needed another round of mending at elbows, knees, and cuffs.

  Jaric tossed the fellow a silver with the unthinking reflex of habit.

  'Thank'e.' The beggar jammed the coin in his boot and straightened with a crooked grin. 'Boat's bailed for ye, master. Best check the starboard bowline. She's chafed a bit, from the storm.'

  Jaric paused while a wagon rumbled past. 'I came as soon as I could.' He reached into his pocket, groped for another coin.

  'Leave be, boy.' The beggar shrugged. 'I do well enough by you.'

  Jaric tossed a copper, spinning, into the air. 'Take it for the cat, then. I've no family to feed.'

  'Right, aye, then.' The beggar caught the coin with the speed of a striking snake. Taen saw him stare after as

  Jaric ran down the dock to the slip where Callinde lay tied.

  Linked through the dream to the boy's concern, the girl stepped aboard the ancient boat. After a hasty glance to ascertain whether the floorboards were dry, Jaric ducked around the headstay and ran anxious hands over the dockline the beggar had mentioned. Frayed plies scraped under his fingers; the rope must certainly be replaced. Squinting against the low sun of afternoon, Jaric bent and unfastened the aft locker. He reached beneath the folded canvas of the headsail in search of his store of spare cordage, and froze suddenly in midmotion. Taen felt a chill jolt through him. Startled, she shared the apprehension which tightened his chest as he dug under the sail and dragged forth an object that could not have been there, yet was. Jaric sank against the thwart, the cold, pale length of an ash flute clenched hard between his hands. Inlay flashed silver as he turned it. The breath came fast and dry in his throat.

  Moved to concern, Taen probed him and encountered stark edges of fear. She never learned why. As if roused by her dream-touch, Jaric stiffened. He flexed his wrists in sharp denial, and the delicate shaft of the flute snapped. Splinters glanced in the sunlight, fell whispering to the deck; and Taen cried out, for as the ash wood broke asunder, a wail of purest sorrow echoed within her mind.

  She protested without thought. 'Jaric, no!' The makers of the flute offered their gift without malice. They wished only to aid him, defend him from harm.

  But the words of the Dreamweaver in his mind only caused the boy to start up in alarm. With a guilty gesture, he tossed the broken instrument into the harbour. As it sank from sight, Taen saw that memory of its origin was linked to another event Jaric had determined to hide.

  Reflexively she pursued the reason; and the dockside where Jaric tended Callinde vanished, swept away by the whine of wind across desolate acres.

  Taen looked down from the carved archway of a tower and saw a place of treeless rock. Bare except for scabrous splotches of lichen, hills fell away to a grey horizon. Trapped by dreams, the girl knew she gazed from a window far distant from Landfast, beyond the borders of Keithland itself. Even as she wondered how a thought from Jaric's mind would lead her here, she sensed movement in the chamber behind her.

  'He will be all you hoped for, and more,' said a voice whose overtones grated like rusty metal.

  The words formed no language spoken by man, but, gifted with a Dreamweaver's talents, Taen understood the meaning. Touched by nameless dread, she turned from the window to view the chamber behind her. Within a vaulted hall of stone, crimson carpets covered a raised, central dais. A mirror pool of black-veined marble reflected a table and carved chair whose yellow-eyed occupant possessed no human features.

  'Bring him hither,' bade the demon on the dais. His tone whistled like flutes. He leaned forward, rippling skin all mottled and scaled like a lizard's. Orange spines tipped fingers, ears, and the armoured plates visible beneath the hem of the garment which swathed his spindly torso. Gold chains winked above spurred ankles.

  'I enter, Lord Scait.' The original speaker strode from the shadowed depths of an antechamber. It moved with the raddled gait of a hunchback, followed by others who supported another apparently ailing or injured. By the fleshy curves of their gill flaps, Taen recognized the toadlike Thienz, empaths whose kind had allied in the attack against Cliffhaven. All but blind in daylight, the demons advanced on rubbery, webbed feet. Crested headdresses clinked, beads and jewels keeping time to their ungainly stride. The party stopped by the poolside, reflected upside down in the water as they offered obeisance to the figure seated on the dais. Taen took a careful look at the other, who bowed woodenly in the grip of wiry Thienz fingers. And her heart twisted terribly inside, for. there stood no demon but a human
male in ragged, salt-stained clothing.

  Black hair lay tangled against the filthy cloth of his collar. His sea boots were torn with wear, and his face a dead mask of exhaustion. Granted a clear view of his features in the pool, Taen felt the vision tighten like a noose around her mind; for the man held between the hideous bodies of the Thienz was Marlson Emien, her natural brother, last seen when he had fled Jaric's sword beneath the Tower of Elrinfaer. But Emien's expression of lifeless uninterest was one his sister had never known before.

  'This is the dissident who succeeds the witch, Tathagres?' said Scait from the dais. 'He came of his own will, you say. Is that so?'

  Emien gave no sign of recognition. His eyes remained fixed, a cold and passionless blue, while the demons discussed him in images which translated in no tongue spoken on Keithland's soil.

  'Lord, that is so.' The spokesman for the Thienz stepped to the lip of the pool. Beads clinked on either side of its jowls as it bobbed its blunt head. 'This Emien-that-was desired the power of his mistress-now-dead. He did murder to claim it. See, Lord, mighty-and-greatest, there are burn scars on the man-flesh of his hands. By this be certain the crystals once-stolen-from-Llondelei ensure our permanent domination of his body. His fate is yours to command.'

  Scait's lips curled, revealing razor rows of sharklike teeth. 'Has he talents? Information? Bring him hither, that I might test his mettle.' The lizard demon flicked spiny fingers and beckoned.

  The Thienz-demons clustered tightly together. Though small and awkward of movement, they proved surprisingly strong. Webbed, toadlike fingers propelled Marlson Emien past the mirror pool, pressing him prone on the carpet before the dais.

  The Demon Lord arose, and with the detailed horror of nightmare, Taen realized his throne was comprised of preserved human remains. Wishing to turn from the image, but unable to abandon knowledge of her brother's fate, she whimpered in the depths of trance, even as the demon ruler of Shadowfane set spurred hands against the sides of Emien's head.