Havenstar Page 6

  By the time she’d spread all they contained out on the floor, her hands were shaking with shock. With helpless pain, she noted someone had even removed her father’s wooden leg and sent that back, but her real shock stemmed from the state of many of the items. Blue Ketter had not been exaggerating when he’d said that Piers’ things had been ‘torn up’. Some of them were in shreds. Much was blood-spattered, although an effort had been made to clean the worst before packing it. She fought down the nausea and regarded the ripped clothing, the tattered notebooks, the slashed bedroll, and felt a total incomprehension. Whatever could possibly have prompted such wanton destruction?

  She wanted to put everything away, to forget. But her curiosity dominated. Why?

  There was something odd about the destruction…

  She sat back on her heels and let her eyes rove over all the items in front of her: clothes, surveying and mapping equipment, cooking utensils, canvas tent, fly and ground sheet. Some things, like the loose sheets of parchment, were untouched. Others, like the padding of the bedroll, had been so thoroughly pulled apart that the only possible reason there could have been to return them to Piers’ heirs was to show that they had not been stolen.

  As her eyes scanned the items, she began to see the pattern. Anything of thickness had been ripped apart. A fur-lined leather doublet, the heels to Piers’ boots, the collar and double yoke of his best travelling shirt, the bedroll, the spines of his notebooks. Other things had suffered too: the telescope had been wrenched from its mounting on the theodolite, and then sliced open. The handle to the cooking pot had been similarly opened up. Only Piers’ staff and his wooden leg had been left untouched, presumably because it was obvious that the former was a single piece of unjointed wood, and because he had still been wearing the latter when he was attacked.

  She took up the telescope and examined it, feeling herself riven through with horror. She could not imagine what tool could have been used to do such a thing: the thick brass body of the instrument had been roughly cut in two lengthways. The edges were jaggedly scalloped and sharp. Not a tool, of course. Unnaturally powerful claws…or teeth.

  A pet. Sweet heaven.

  But who would order the destruction of a ’scope? A telescope was one of the most valuable of all artefacts because the knowledge of how to grind the lenses had been lost after the Rending. Piers’ instrument had been passed from father to son through generations of mapmakers. Possibly the body may have been renewed and the lenses realigned several times, but there was little doubt that the lenses themselves dated back to the days of the Old Margravate, to Malinawar, before the world had been rent. They were priceless.

  Piers’ murderers had been looking for something.

  Something small that could be hidden in the lining of a doublet or the spine of a book. Or flat, so it could be folded up and put in the heel of a boot, or rolled up to fit inside a pot handle or a telescope. Precious stones? Money? A map? Yet mapmakers did not carry large sums of money and valuables, nor did they secrete their maps away from sight like hidden wealth. And what the murderers had been looking for had to be something more precious than a telescope. Still, if he did have something valuable, she knew exactly where he would have put it, and it was apparently a place that the searchers had not considered…

  Reluctantly, with a sense that she was somehow about to violate her father, she reached out to take up the wooden leg. The padded cup made to hold the stump of his amputation was cut from soft leather, which had then been lined with flannel and stuffed in between with tree-cotton. It was not the cup that interested Keris, however. She took the leg across to the shop counter where she freed the several linchpins that attached the cup to the lag-eye screws in the wood. She held the peg up to the light and peered into its hollow interior. There was money there as she had expected; but there was something else as well. Gently she upended it and shook out its contents into her other hand.

  A rolled up mapskin.

  She knew immediately it was not a Kaylen map; the skin was the wrong colour. Carefully she unrolled it across the counter.

  And stared. And stared.

  Nothing had prepared her for this, nothing.

  A trompleri map.

  Her first thought was an incredulous—and joyous—So they exist! Then she felt the hot stab of prickling fear. There was magic in such a map.

  And lastly the thought came, Perhaps there were those who would feel a trompleri map was worth killing for…

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter Four

  And the map the Maker gave to Knight Weddon was such that had never been seen before. The mountains stood high before him and the Deep writhed across the mapskin, showing its wickedness. Knight Weddon fled the Minions, following the path the map showed him and was received safely…

  —Pilgrims VIII: 5: 42-44

  Keris worked hard on the charts. She’d decided thirty-five master charts were needed that year and they were among the hardest she had ever had to create, with more ley lines than usual and some odd manifestations along the length of the Wanderer—the Bitch, as Piers had always called it. In addition, his notes had been torn and muddled out of sequence, so it was sometimes hard to tell which figures corresponded to which ley lines. She worked fifteen hours a day and even then had to skimp on the final artistic work of the copies, which was a blow to her pride. She was only slightly mollified to hear the copied maps praised by those who came in to buy them. The buyers thought Thirl had drawn them, of course, and it rankled to hear him praised when all he had done was the tracings and repetitive work. It hurt too, to have to send out most of the maps uncoloured. Without Piers to help and with so much more to do than usual, there simply was not time to include the extras that had made her work special in the past.

  She laboured in the kitchen where her mother now slept, out of sight of the customers, keeping her mother company and trying not to see how fast Sheyli’s health was deteriorating, trying not to hear her restless tossing and moaning. The household chores and much of the nursing were now given over to Mistress Pottle. Even Thirl had been forced to acknowledge Keris could not manage the house as well as the map-making, and he’d been willing enough to pay Mistress Pottle to work double her normal number of hours.

  He himself went to the tavern in Upper Kibbleberry rather less and spent most of his time working on the copies in the shop or serving behind the counter. He raised the price of all maps of the Unstable, an action which drew instant protest from his Unstabler customers. As much as they grumbled, in the end they paid up. No one else in the First Stability sold such good charts, and to try to cross the Unstable without the benefit of the latest maps would have been foolhardy for even the best of guides.

  While she worked at the main table in the kitchen, Keris propped the door between the room and the shop ajar so that she could listen to what the customers had to say. It annoyed her that Thirl was not interested in the stories people had to tell of their crossings; too often he would cut short a tale of adversity or adventure with a curt, ‘Well, which map is it that you’re wanting then?’

  Once, when Yerrie came tearing into the kitchen in total panic, she heard the gravelly tones of the man with the obsidian eyes as he bought a sequence of maps, asking for coloured ones. Thirl, impatient with his request, answered him rudely. The man insisted, his tone steely, and Thirl offered him the master charts at an outrageous price. Keris gritted her teeth to stop her protest. Piers had never sold master charts.

  Protracted haggling finally resulted in a price they both agreed on, after which Thirl brusquely added there’d be no more updated maps from the workrooms of Piers Kaylen next season. The man said, ‘I’m not surprised. I had heard Piers had died and I have also heard that Thirl Kaylen couldn’t match his sire.’ The words were said politely enough, but Keris had the feeling that the man knew perfectly well he was talking to Piers’ son. She suspected the remark was made to exact revenge for Thirl’s manner and his exorbitant prices.

  Keris alm
ost heard Thirl bristle. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked. But the man gave only a noncommittal answer, and Thirl, when he came through into the main room afterwards, looked strangely disconcerted. Master obsidian-eyes has that effect on people, it seems, Keris thought, wryly amused.

  ‘Creation,’ said Mistress Pottle, who had also heard the exchange, ‘that one’s got a voice like a mountain on the move. I wouldn’t like to cross by him on a dark night.’

  Harin Markle came several times in the evenings, ostensibly to see Thirl, more covertly to court her. He made a poor job of it. Lacking in imagination, he was puzzled by the absence of any enthusiasm for marriage on her part, unable to accept that she was simply not interested. He’d decided her indifference was all an act. Such a plain girl, he thought, must want to marry him and she was therefore playing hard to get. She found his dogged attentions, so obviously inspired by greed rather than passion, both ludicrous and insulting.

  Thirl merely shrugged in a disinterested fashion when he saw she was not going to encourage his friend. ‘You always were too stubborn for your own good,’ he remarked.

  She knew he was continuing with his plans for the tavern. Mistress Pottle told her he had ordered chairs and tables from the carpenter in the village. The blacksmith’s wife, dropping in with some mutton-brain jelly one day, said that she’d heard Thirl had made a large order of wine from the vintner’s up near Kt Weddon’s, and Keris herself overheard Thirl talking to the brewer’s man from Beckle East about ale and beer, and to Harin about purchasing some mead from Middle Kt Beogor.

  She didn’t ask where Thirl was getting the money from to make the orders; she knew. He was raiding the coins behind the lose brick at the back of the sink; pipeweed money, Piers had called it, meaning money to buy the luxuries and necessities of his old age once he could no longer work—things like the smoking herbs for his pipe, which were imported from the Eighth Stability.

  Thirl’s buying spree upset her. The few gold coins would not last long, and after they were gone, there would only be her dowry money. According to the Rule, all the money was now legally Thirl’s as long as he undertook to look after his mother until her death, and his sister until she married. In fact, provided she was cared for, an unmarried woman had no rights to property unless her living male relatives—and the Rule Office—sanctioned the ownership. Keris had heard the village devotions-chantor, Nebuthnar, pontificate on the reasons for such laws. ‘This Rule is designed to protect the interests of the weaker members of our community, the children and husbandless women,’ he’d said.

  ‘Who says such women are weaker?’ she’d asked cheekily. She’d been about fourteen at the time. ‘All the oldest people in the village are women.’

  He’d not been able to give an answer that satisfied her. His spluttered, ‘The Rule brings Order and should therefore not be questioned,’ was hardly an adequate explanation. Order, all important Order. Regularity was paramount, change was anathema. Order ruled, and the Rule brought Order. What nobody mentioned was that the Rule stifled, that Order suffocated.

  She and Chantor Nebuthnar, a pompous man who spluttered saliva everywhere when he talked, were old enemies. Sheyli had once remarked that a place the size of Kibbleberry was not thought to merit a chantor of quality. Certainly Chantor Nebuthnar lacked learning, just as he lacked humility and half a dozen other virtues normally considered desirable in a chantor. What he did not lack was belief in the necessity of obedience to the Rule and a forthright officiousness in applying the law. Not only was he responsible for seeing that the Rule was obeyed, but he performed the duties of a mentor-chantor as well, which meant Keris had been in his winter reading classes as a child. She’d stuck it out for four years, by which time she could read and figure as well as he could.

  It did not help that he had an innate distrust of all the Kaylen family because Piers worked the Unstable, and in Nebuthnar’s rather simple mind, Unstablers were suspect. Mapmakers and such lived outside of the Rule for the greater part of a year, after all. He kept a close watch on the Kaylens and pounced every time one of them made a mistake. He complained when Piers did not wear regulation clothing, fined Keris once when he caught her wearing trousers to ride Ygraine, railed against Thirl when he was caught climbing down from Mistress Verlan’s window when Master Verlan was away—all transgressions against Order.

  Still, Keris now appreciated his visits to her mother, to offer her solace and the usual homilies to the dying. Sheyli needed the comfort of religion and he seemed able to offer her hope for an afterlife, which was more than all his teachings in winter school had done for Keris herself. She might have thought better of him, if he had not sought her out following one of these visits to ask her what thought she had given to marriage.

  She gave him a level look. ‘My mother lies mortally sick, and you ask me such a question?’

  ‘More reason now to ask it than ever. You will soon be an orphan and in need of a man’s protection—’

  ‘I have a brother.’

  ‘And he’ll have his own family soon. You must look to start your own. I understand that Harin Markle from—’

  ‘I will not wed Harin!’

  ‘Ah.’ He considered that, obviously searching his mind for a possible reason, and not finding one. ‘Ah, well then,’ he said finally, ‘if marriage doesn’t appeal, then perhaps you should then consider a chanterie—’

  ‘I didn’t say marriage did not appeal,’ she snapped. ‘It is Harin that lacks appeal. And I have no intention of donning a chantora’s habit!’

  He shook his head sadly at her vehemence. The scarlet tassels on his brightly coloured hat danced in emphasis. ‘Child, child, remember to whom you speak. You must find your own place within the Order of the Stability. Every person has his place, and every place is important in the pattern of stability. You just have to find yours.’

  ‘I don’t really have all that much choice, do I? No profession is open to me because my father’s is not available to women and my mother had none that could be passed on to a daughter, save that of a married woman.’

  ‘You would not want to do anything that would encourage instability or disorder by deviating from your ancestral lines, would you?’ he asked gently. ‘The safety of us all depends on the obedience to the Rule of every individual. And perhaps you have more choice than you know. If a cloistered life does not interest you, then perhaps you should give thought to joining the Knighten’s Ordering. That also is open to one such as you.’

  She gaped, speechless. ‘Chantor,’ she said at last, all her irritation vanishing in her surprise, ‘can I have heard you aright? Me? A chantist holy Knighte?’

  ‘Sometimes those children who give us the most trouble are those for whom the Maker has the greatest plans,’ he said simply. She was sure they could not have been his words; he was parroting another. ‘A Knight—male or female—has to have a character stronger than the ordinary. A female Knighte must be a woman who does not fit the normal mould of womanhood.’

  She interrupted. ‘Chantor, a Knighte must also be a woman of great piety, ready to dedicate her life to Chantry and the fighting of Chaos, the keeping of Order. Isn’t there twenty years of training and study and kinesis and piety before a Knighte emerges from her novitiate and can begin her roving life? I heard once that of every thousand men and women who enter training, only one emerges fit to wear the knighten symbol.’

  ‘An exaggeration. I believe there are at the moment one woman and ten male Knights. Eleven if you count Knight Edion of Galman.’ Knight Edion, she knew, had been a man of great learning, revered for his scholarship and wisdom as much as for his charity. He had disappeared inside the Unstable ten or more years earlier. There had been an outrageous rumour hinting he had joined forces with the Unmaker, becoming his personal assistant. Others said the opposite: he was actually fighting Lord Carasma in eternal battle somewhere or other. The most persistent rumour was that he’d settled for a hermit’s life somewhere in the Unstable, the most pernicious as fa
r as Chantry was concerned was that he had been murdered by some of the more conservative of the sixteen Hedrin—the chantors of Chantry’s ruling body, the Sanhedrin—because they thought he was preaching heresy.

  All of that mattered little to her. Knights may have lived wandering unorthodox lives of adventure, at least after their training, but the price was far too high for her. ‘I’d fail the first week of training!’ she said. And still be condemned to twenty years of toil, trying to attain the unattainable.

  He shrugged, obviously privately agreeing with her. ‘If the Maker wants you, you will feel the call.’

  She thought with annoyance, He’s been told to look for suitable candidates, and he’s decided it’s one way of ridding the village of me. The one person who did not ‘fit the normal mould of womankind.’ Someone who disturbed his sense of Order. She smiled sweetly. ‘I’ll think about it. And doubtless, if it is my destiny, the Maker will tell me.’

  The smile he gave back was uncertain. He did not know whether she mocked him.

  ~~~~~~~

  Gradually, as the summer days lengthened, there was less work to do on mapmaking and Thirl was away from the shop more. Keris welcomed his absence. Sometimes, when there was no sign of customers and her mother was napping, she would take the trompleri map out of its hiding place and pore over it with a strange mixture of unease and euphoria. She longed to speak to someone about it, but trusted no one enough to divulge such a secret. She had to content herself with remembering all that she’d heard about such maps, with piecing together what Piers had told her, and the odd snippets of information she’d heard from time to time from customers.

  ‘Trompleri,’ Piers had said once, ‘that’s not the correct word. It was actually three words in the old language. Three words run together to make one, and then hopelessly mispronounced. The original words meant “trick the eye”.’