Song of the Shiver Barrens Read online

  ‘No, you cannot. She is supposed to keep an eye on you.’

  Samia gave an exaggerated sigh and screwed up her nose at Arrant. He laughed and the two of them dropped behind a little to have their own conversation. ‘How come you don’t have any control over your cabochon power?’ she asked.

  ‘How come you don’t have a gold cabochon like your father?’ he countered.

  ‘You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours.’

  ‘All right. I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s not fair! “Don’t know” is not a proper answer. That’s such a sprout thing to say.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. It might be because my mother was in a lot of danger when she was pregnant with me and kept using up all her power to save us.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Your turn. Why isn’t your cabochon gold?’

  ‘Well, Papa’s parents were Illusos, not Magoroth. So he’s the odd one, not me. Mama was Magoroth, though, so I guess everyone hoped I would be too. It doesn’t matter much, cos I want to be a healer, and Illusos are good at that.’

  ‘A healer?’ he asked, amused. He could not imagine her being gentle and nurturing. She was rarely tactful, never still, always inquisitive. He couldn’t make up his mind if she was a pest, or a fun person to have around, but he had a good idea that things would never be dull in her vicinity. At least she was more amusing than the bloodthirsty and bossy Vevi, and less calculating than Serenelle Korden. He decided he would have liked to have a sister like Samia Garis.

  They rode straight down the paveway towards the fishing port of Ordensa, stopping at the Tyranian-built wayhouses every night. Constructed to ensure Tyranian legions could deploy rapidly, the road followed an old shleth route serving the small vales to the southwest of the capital, before reaching the town of Asufa and then heading for the coast. It was not as heavily travelled as the major paveway that joined Sandmurram and Madrinya, and once they were more than half a day away from the city, they passed few long-distance travellers.

  The Three Wells Wayhouse sat at a fork where an unpaved shleth trail, heading northwest to the First Rake, parted company from the paveway that curved more directly southwards. The architecture of the wayhouse was pure Tyranian: rooms, arranged around tiled and fountained atriums, looked narcissistically inwards. Floors were patterned with mosaics, and a terracotta tiled roof topped the one-storey structure.

  ‘Where do they get the water from?’ Arrant asked Garis as they rode through the archway into the entrance yard and servants came to take the mounts. He could hear water running somewhere within the building.

  ‘An underground channel,’ he answered. ‘Comes from a source under that hill over there. Enjoy a bath tonight, because there’s no wayhouse at the end of the track. We Magoroth are the only people who ever go there, after all, and only when we have a youngster in need of a sword. There’s a soak that supplies enough water for us and the animals, plus a few storage huts beside the First Rake, where we keep grain and feed, but that’s all.’

  ‘Why did we need to come this far south?’ Arrant asked as he slipped down from the saddle. ‘Isn’t a part of the First Rake closer to Madrinya than this?’

  Temellin nodded. ‘The distance between the rakes is broad near Madrinya; too far to cross to the next rake in one night. Anyone attempting it would die. Further north still, where it does get narrower, the rakes are high and rocky, rugged enough to be impassable. So we always crossed to the Mirage around here, and it became the traditional place for a young Magoroth to receive their sword. Your mother actually got hers on the Third or Fourth Rake.’ He fell silent then, and Arrant knew he was thinking of Sarana, regretting her absence.

  A pang of longing gripped his heart. He missed her too, even though his anger at her infidelity sometimes returned to haunt him. Her relationship with Brand had sparked so much grief…

  Just two days after the Mirager and his party had left for the Shiver Barrens, a courier arrived with a letter for Arrant from the Exaltarch. Temellin’s scribe gave it to Eris who placed it, still unopened, on the small table in Arrant’s room, to await his return.

  It was a long ride from the Three Wells Wayhouse to the First Rake, with only one brief stop at a vale too small to have a proper lake. A few villagers lived alongside a soak where they grew what food they needed for themselves, and maintained a livery stable for mounts which they rented to the Magoroth who passed that way.

  Several hours after leaving the village, Garis was finally able to point ahead and say, ‘Look, Sam—that red line along the horizon? That’s it. That’s the First Rake.’

  For several hours more, the red line was still only an edging to the sky where it met the flat plate of the land. In the late afternoon the line sharpened into a jagged contortion of peaks and indentations like clay pummelled with the thumbprints of a divine sculptor and then baked in the sun. Alternately shadowed and sun-blasted, the red rock of the rake vanished off to left and right as far as the eye could see. Arrant’s breath quickened. All his life he had been heading towards this moment, towards this place, where he was to leave his childhood behind and slip his hand into the hilt of a sword that would amplify his powers. ‘Please, let it happen,’ he thought. ‘Let this solve all my problems.’

  Yet, used to the grand peaks of the snow-capped Alps, he found the height of the rake puny as they approached, its slopes more impressive for their artistry than their majesty.

  Garis laughed, reading his lack of wonder. ‘Believe me, when you are riding the Barrens, with the frost breaking up under the paws of your mount and the sands escaping the crust to begin their deadly song—any rake looks very desirable indeed.’

  Arrant nodded, and felt regret; crossing the Barrens would never be something he knew. The Mirage on the other side was banned to them now. The agreement giving them access—made by his grandfather, Mirager-solad, and the Mirage Makers—had ended. Besides, the Mirage was now far too dangerous. The Mirage Makers had been unable to prevent the Ravage killing people there, even before the decision had been made to leave. Tarran. Gods, Tarran, I’m sorry…

  ‘Come,’ said Garis, ‘I’ll race you to the top!’ He urged his mount forward onto the red rock, and Sam raced after him. She was at the crest first, and Arrant had an idea that Garis had not let her win, either. As Arrant joined them, her father was protesting, ‘You have an unfair advantage—less weight for the beast to carry uphill…’

  But Samia wasn’t listening. She was groping for words to describe what she thought of the Shiver Barrens. ‘Creeping cats! That’s—that’s—’

  ‘Creepy?’ her father suggested.

  She pulled a face at his silliness. ‘No! It’s wondrous.’

  Arrant had to agree. The landscape below fascinated, drawing him. Another red line just visible on the horizon, and between him and that far-off barrier…purple sand, swirling through the air in thick whirls and eddies like windborne spume whipped up from restless surf. The grains sang as they flew.

  He slid from his mount and began to walk down the slope towards the edge of the rock, where the sands lapped at the rake like waves slipping up and down a seashore. Gods, it was beautiful. And scary. He shivered, fear prickling in his throat. These sands could kill without thought.

  ‘Can you hear it?’ Temellin asked, coming to stand beside him on that strange shoreline.

  ‘Yes.’ Oh, yes. The whispered song was tuneful, yet somehow just beyond the range of his understanding. He strained to hear properly, thinking he ought to be able to make out the words—but the harder he tried, the more indistinct the meaning became. ‘Like sounds carried on the wind in snatches,’ he said. ‘It never quite makes sense.’ He turned to Temellin. ‘Why don’t the grains blow away in the wind?’

  ‘They have an attraction one to the other. You can’t separate any one grain too far from the rest. If you were to take one and bring it up here in your closed hand, the moment you opened your fingers it would fly back down again to join the others. My feeling
is that the sands are all one entity. Semi-sentient, if you like. A being like none other, but alive nonetheless. Not everyone agrees with me. Korden thinks I am moondaft, but it would explain why the sands never blow away in the wind.’

  ‘When can I walk into it?’

  ‘Not today. It is already too late. The Mirage Makers won’t be there now, not when the sands begin to stop dancing towards dusk. Tomorrow, in the heat of the day, they will call you. You must not enter unless you hear that call, otherwise you’d be doomed. It is not a pleasant death.’

  The wariness in his voice widened Arrant’s eyes. ‘He’s afraid,’ he thought, surprised that even a man like his father, who must have crossed the Barrens countless times, could still regard them with such respect.

  ‘Memory stirs old griefs,’ Temellin said softly. ‘I have lost friends in there. But it does not hate us. It just doesn’t care.’

  Ligea—no, Sarana—had told him that, too. The grains of sand killed without remorse. They frayed clothes into no more than a heap of thread. Then they abraded you to death, rubbing the skin away in slow excoriation, rasping the flesh with their tiny shivering particles. Flesh oozed, then bled. Sand bounced into the ears, driving the victim mad as the eardrums perforated and grains penetrated deeper. Eyelids shredded under the onslaught. Eyes were scored to blindness. No bodily orifice was safe from the squirming, scouring, rasping erosion. If you were lucky, you choked on sand. If you weren’t so lucky, you died when your flesh finally bled too much for you to live.

  Temellin withdrew his sword from its scabbard. ‘Out there, on the Shiver Barrens, there is only one magic that works. Look.’ He swung the weapon in an arc towards the sands. The translucent blade flared briefly once at the top of the curve. ‘The flare tells us the direction of the closest part of the next rake. It was how we found our way.’

  ‘More accurate than following stars,’ Garis added.

  ‘Why doesn’t other Magor power work here?’ Arrant asked.

  Temellin answered. ‘Who knows? Some say the Shiver Barrens feed on it, draining our cabochons and our swords. The odd thing is that the Mirage Makers’ powers are undiminished. I’ve often wondered why. What is it that makes their power different from ours, when ours has its origins in theirs?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose it matters really. It’s just a minor mystery that niggles my intellectual curiosity.’

  Samia’s eyes shone as she bent to touch the grains of sand dancing at the edge of the red rock. They curled away, and she laughed.

  ‘Try your left hand,’ Garis said and Samia did so. Grains of sand nestled in the heart of her palm, gathering around her cabochon.

  ‘They are all different colours!’ she exclaimed. Arrant leaned over to look. It was true: the grains were all the colours of the rainbow when seen individually. She giggled. ‘They tickle.’

  ‘Listen, they’re humming,’ he said. It was true. When he bent to listen he could hear their song, but the words were still out of reach.

  ‘Do you remember?’ Temellin said softly to Garis. ‘It seems like only yesterday…’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Remember what?’ Samia asked.

  ‘When Arrant’s mother saw the Shiver Barrens for the first time.’

  ‘You were here then too?’ Arrant asked Garis.

  It was Temellin who replied. ‘Yes. And Brand, as well. The four of us.’

  They were all silent. Arrant was embarrassed. Speaking to his father of Sarana and Brand in the same breath made him want to sink into the ground with shame—his shame, and hers. Samia, oblivious, asked, ‘Who is Brand?’

  It was Garis who replied. ‘An Altani rebel, the same man who helped us when we were attacked just before your mother died. One of the finest men who ever lived. He was killed in Tyr saving Miragersarana’s life.’

  ‘Oh. That’s sad.’

  ‘It is,’ Temellin said. ‘And that’s why we honour him with our memories, and those he died for go on living as he would have wanted.’ He laid a hand on Arrant’s shoulder. ‘Tomorrow you become a true Magoroth. Garis, get the others down here to set up the camp, will you?’

  He waited until Garis and Samia had gone, then he said quietly to Arrant, ‘I’ve been a fool. I saw your face just then, when we were speaking of Brand. I felt your emotions. I should have realised earlier. You were jealous. That’s why you stopped talking to Sarana. You knew they were lovers.’

  ‘You knew that too?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘She told you?’ Arrant flushed, his face and neck warming with embarrassment.

  ‘She did say Brand had returned to Tyr and was staying in the palace.’ He shrugged. ‘She really didn’t have to tell me any more. Cabochon, Arrant, of course I knew. They’d had a relationship before. He was her closest friend and he loved her. What did it matter? I wasn’t there, could never be there. If I had been, it wouldn’t have happened.’ He sighed. ‘Why is it that children refuse to see their parents as human beings with adult needs? Listen, up until then, your mother and I had so little time together as lovers. A little over a month if you include that time in Ordensa when you were five. That’s all. We loved each other so much—but in fact, that’s all we’ve ever had. Would you have had us be celibate for the rest of our lives?’

  Arrant’s flush deepened. He felt uncomfortably hot, and he couldn’t think of anything to say. He felt a fool.

  Temellin was relentless. ‘I’ve had other women in my bed. There have even been women I had a deep fondness for. But they weren’t Sarana. And as much as she loved Brand, he wasn’t me. I’ll admit I was jealous at first, but once I was sure of her love, it didn’t matter. I liked him. Probably a lot more than he liked me. I was glad she had a true friend in the midden heap that was Tyr. It never made the faintest difference to the way we felt about each other and it was just too bad that you were not mature enough then to understand. A lot of people paid for that mistake.

  ‘And you made another mistake when you arrived here: you should have told me what was bothering you. We have some damage to repair, you and I, and you have to forgive your mother. You understand me?’

  Arrant looked down at his feet, shame sweeping through him. He nodded.

  Temellin turned him to look at the Shiver Barrens. ‘Tomorrow you become a man out there, in more ways than you can imagine. That sword you’ll claim brings responsibility. Like all Magoroth, you become a guardian of this land. Unlike others, you could one day rule it. You can’t be a child any more.’

  ‘I understand.’ And he did. ‘And I do have things to tell you.’

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow, afterwards.’ Temellin smiled, gently chiding. ‘Right now, you dropped your reins and walked away from your mount. Never a good idea anywhere, least of all here. Go and attend to the beast.’

  Arrant scrambled to obey.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The moment he felt the call, mid-morning of the next day, he knew what it was. It had a familiarity. He had touched the essence of the Mirage Makers before; because of Tarran, he knew the whisper of them through his mind.

  He scrambled to his feet and looked across at where his father sat, leaning against a rock in the shade of one of the serrated peaks of the rake. ‘They are calling me,’ he said.

  ‘Then it is time.’ Temellin came across and walked him down to the edge of the sands.

  Garis had to grab Samia to stop her from following. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is a private moment for a man and his son.’

  She thought about that, and nodded. ‘Do you feel bad that you will never do this for me—bring me here to receive a Magor sword?’ she asked.

  He smiled at her, and shook his head. ‘No. Why should I? I think you will do very well without one.’

  ‘So do I. But Arrant needs his. He needs it badly.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid he does,’ he said softly. They turned as one, to watch.

  Where sands and rock met, Temellin stopped. Arrant held out his left hand and they clasped cabochons.
Arrant felt nothing and suspected his father didn’t either; no layers of communication, no knowledge of the other’s emotions, a lack that honed an edge to the regret each felt.

  Temellin said quietly, ‘Tell him—tell him I think of him often. Every day of his life, I have thought of him, and wished that things had been…somehow different.’

  Arrant held himself rigid. Temellin wasn’t talking about Tarran; not really. He meant the brother he thought Arrant had never met. Aloud he said, ‘He may not be there.’

  ‘He will be. Of course he will. Listen, once you are under the sands, you will see very little. Walk towards the voices you hear. Afterwards, to get back to the rake, well—if your sword is working, you can use the flare from it to tell you the way to go, as I showed you.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘You’ll have to rely on the Mirage Makers. They always wait until the recipient of the sword is back safe on the rake. While they are there, the sands will not hurt you. If your sword doesn’t flare the first time you take hold of it, ask them what to do. In days gone by, they used to talk to us mostly with visions, illusions really, but since your brother has been with them, they seem able to use language more.’

  He nodded, quelling his nervousness. Of course the Mirage Makers would help. There was no need to be afraid. He held his head high and turned to walk into the Shiver Barrens. The Quyriot necklet was strangely hot at his neck; that had never happened before unless he was mounted. ‘The sun must have warmed the beads,’ he thought. He tucked his shirt collar under them to keep them from his skin.

  Ahead of him the sands parted, just as they must have done for his mother fourteen years earlier. ‘This is my second time,’ he thought in wonderment; she had been pregnant then, with him.

  The ground was hard beneath his feet, and the sands deepened as he walked in: up to his knees, then his thighs, then his waist. Nothing touched him; the grains swirled and twisted, a whirlpool with him at the centre. It was like walking into the ocean and not being touched by the seawater. He went deeper and the singing intensified, became more frenzied. Words caressed him—he could have sworn they were words—yet he could make no sense of them. He thought he felt his necklet move, and laid a hand over the beads. The runes shifted under his fingers, and he snatched his hand away. ‘You over-imaginative fool,’ he muttered.