Song of the Shiver Barrens Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Temellin said. ‘I misunderstood. I thought you might be thinking of this Tarran as being real in the sense you did when you were younger. That is, someone who came and played with you. The dream of a lonely, imaginative boy, and understandable at the time, perhaps. I just wish, well—that you would be honest with me now. I can feel that you are still hiding something from me, something important. Arrant, I am your father. Up until now, not much of a father, I know, and I don’t seem to be handling this at all well, but I want to do better. Your trust would mean a lot to me.’

  Another chance, yet Arrant felt himself drowning in dismay. If he told the truth about Tarran, the odds were that Temellin would think he was as mad as the Rift wayhousekeeper and unworthy of being his heir. If he told the truth about why he had been angry with his mother, then he risked wrecking his parents’ relationship. He chose his words carefully. ‘What made you so certain that the Tarran I believed in at eight or nine wasn’t real? A Mirage Maker communicating with his brother. Why shouldn’t it have been possible?’

  ‘To be quite honest with you, I did consider the possibility of your playmate really being my other son. After all, Sarana did communicate with the Mirage Makers when she was in trouble inside a Ravage sore. Did she ever tell you that? But then they used images and concepts, not words, and the conversation was laboured and difficult, until they found a better way and used the Ravage beasts. They manipulated their jaws and tongues to make them speak to her. She wasn’t in Tyrans either, halfway across the known world. She was there, in the Mirage. And we do know Mirage Makers can’t leave the Mirage or the Shiver Barrens. Usually they communicate only in the Shiver Barrens. Even there they are unable to speak as we do. They twist the song of the sands, as you will discover. The idea that a Mirage Maker could detach himself from the Mirage, travel somehow to Tyrans, locate you, and then speak in a way that is beyond their capabilities—it was simply too outlandish for me to believe.’

  ‘But Tarran is not just a Mirage Maker. He’s all human too. And we have a connection—the same father.’

  Temellin paused before he answered in words that held no warmth. ‘Do you still think the Tarran of your imagination back then was real?’

  ‘I believed him to be real at the time.’

  ‘To invent a playmate is common enough in small children. I remember my own sister, Shirin. She made up another brother for herself and used to bring him out whenever I was mean to her. She insisted he had a chair at the table at mealtime, and was served a plate of food. I ridiculed it, but he was real to her.’ For a moment he looked stricken. ‘She died on the night of the Shimmer Feast massacres.’

  There was a long silence before he added, ‘You were a lonely boy, that’s obvious, and so you took what you knew to exist and made it—him—into something that gave you comfort. Look, soon we will take you to the Shiver Barrens to receive your Magor sword and you will meet the real Mirage Makers. Then you will understand. Your brother will probably be there, inside the entity. Perhaps he might even be able to speak to you, after a fashion. But that’s all, Arrant. That’s all there will ever be. He was human once, but then he became a Mirage Maker. He’s not like you, and never could be.’

  Arrant didn’t reply.

  ‘You don’t still believe in that childhood playmate do you?’ Temellin’s dismay bordered on repugnance, so strong even Arrant could feel it.

  Desperate to have his father’s respect, he said, ‘I don’t have an imaginary playmate, Father. As you pointed out, I am thirteen now, not a child seeking companionship. And I am not mad, either, hearing imaginary voices in my head like that crazy keeper at the Rift wayhouse.’

  Temellin frowned. ‘So why ask how I knew your playmate was not real? Arrant, I need your assurance that you have put all this childishness behind you. Tell me now that you don’t believe that your Mirage Maker brother and your playmate were one and the same. Tell me you don’t believe you have ever spoken to your brother.’ He was begging, desperate to find in Arrant a son he could admire and love in spite of what had happened.

  Arrant paled. His dilemma seemed unsolvable. If he told the truth, then Temellin would think he was daft. He would condemn him for believing something he thought to be childish silliness. If he lied, then Temellin would know it and still think exactly the same thing—that he believed in an imaginary playmate. The silence dragged. He confined his emotions deep inside him. He obliterated all feeling, stopped his fear dead, blanked emotion from his mind. He looked Temellin in the eye and said coldly, ‘I think you will just have to believe in me. I am your son, after all. Do you think I am silly enough to have imaginary conversations with someone I falsely imagine to be my brother?’

  Temellin stared at him, uncertain. Finally he asked, ‘Are you going to tell me the truth about what took you out on the streets of Tyr without your mother’s knowledge?’

  ‘I—I can’t.’ Arrant watched the last warmth in Temellin’s expression fade, and felt his own spirit diminish. Something that had been within his grasp was slipping away, and he didn’t know how to bring it back. Where had it all gone so wrong? That hard, cold lump of his boyhood was back, huge and unyielding inside him.

  Temellin drew in a deep breath. ‘With regard to Brand’s death and your mother’s injury, we all make mistakes and sometimes they have unpleasant consequences. There’s not a person in this world who has lived a life utterly free of folly. You have been unluckier than most, that’s all, in that the consequences were so tragic. They are better not dwelled upon. I want you to put it all behind you, forgotten.’ Cold words said in chilled tones. Words too formal to be comforting, tone too flat to be free of resentment.

  Arrant’s thoughts were bleak. ‘He doesn’t want me. I am nothing to him. He wanted a different kind of son and he’s disappointed with what he’s got.’ Forget what happened? No, there was no forgetting. And never could be, not by either of them. Let alone by Ligea. Brand was dead, by all that was holy! And Temellin didn’t explain how it was possible to forget the shrivelling horror of the scenes imprinted within him…Brand dying, Ligea bleeding—Vortex, so much blood—the light dying in Favonius’s eyes.

  Temellin made an obvious effort. ‘Your problem is your lack of control over your power. If you’d had the control of a normal Magoroth boy of your age, this would never have happened. So, what we have to do now is concentrate on developing your control. Here in Madrinya we have general academies for the Theuros and Illusos and Magoroth. You will start in the Magoroth Academy. When you have settled in a bit, we will leave for the Shiver Barrens, so you can get your sword.’ It was the Mirager speaking to one of the Magoroth, not a father to a son. Any chance of rapport had vanished.

  Arrant nodded. His emotions strangled him, all of them so entangled he couldn’t even decide what predominated.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, Arrant. You will soon catch up with the others of your age. Now go and get those papers from Sarana. Oh, and that’s another thing: please don’t call her Ligea. Her real name is Sarana. It always was. Do you think you can find your way back to your room, or shall I send someone with you?’

  Arrant turned in a full circle to look around his bedroom. He had not expected anything as luxurious as the palace in Tyr, but he had thought the Mirager’s Pavilion would be better than this. The floor was tiled with terracotta, not marble, and strewn with shleth pelts. The bed was just a pallet on a platform, the bedding woven of undyed shleth wool. There was no statuary, no wall niches for ornaments. Furniture was made from cane and reeds, not wood. A starkly plain room, sunny and bright, but bare.

  He bit his lip. This wasn’t Tyr and he had to stop comparing the two.

  He undid the straps of his pack to extract the gifts and documents Ligea had sent to Temellin, and tried not to think about his father’s anger. Tried not to think about the way he had dodged speaking of the brother he knew. Tried not to think about the implications. Tried to make excuses for himself, for his father. ‘I wanted him to like me.
I wanted him to be proud of me…I couldn’t tell the truth. And I shouldn’t blame him for being angry; Ligea almost died because of what I did. Just as bad, she almost lost everything she had fought for. He loves her. Who wouldn’t be angry?’

  Dragging his feet, striving not to think about what had just happened, he went downstairs to where his father was waiting.

  As he raised his hand to knock at his father’s door, an unwanted thought popped into his head: ‘What about Tarran?’ Tarran wanted to use him to get to know his father. More than that too. What was it Tarran had said just before they’d left Tyr? Maybe, if you came, you could think of some way to help us. And, he, Arrant, was the only clear line of communication between the Mirage Makers and the Magor.

  ‘Acheron’s mists,’ he thought in deep misery, ‘what have I done? I’ve as good as told my father Tarran doesn’t exist, when I should be convincing him he does—because it’s important.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  From the city of Getria, Ligea and Gevenan followed the paveway to the town of Begum in order to visit the legionnaire camp there. ‘Morale boost needed,’ Gevenan had said when he’d proposed the addition to their trip. ‘They need to see their Exaltarch alive and well.’

  Ligea enjoyed being out on the road again, away from the protocol and hypocrisy of the highborn life in a city. Of course, she was now accompanied everywhere by a contingent of her Imperial Guards, not to mention an astonishing number of attendants all apparently necessary for her comfort. ‘Whoever authorised all these people to come along?’ she’d asked the very first time she had travelled away from Tyr as the Exaltarch.

  ‘No one,’ Gevenan had replied. ‘It’s just the way it has always been done. Don’t change a thing, or you will upset everyone from the flunkies of your own palace kitchen to the lowest potboy in every wayhouse you stay in.’ So she had sighed and acquiesced and dreamed of being Sarana Solad in Kardiastan.

  Just after the Petrum River bridge, one of the legionnaires came riding up to her from the front of the column. He saluted, saying, ‘Exalted, there’s a Quyriot horseman up ahead, says he wants to talk to you. Old fellow, dirty, with a pony covered in tatty bear-skins. Both of them stink, man and beast. Says he knew you before you were Exaltarch.’

  She brought her senses into play and exclaimed to Gevenan, ‘It’s Berg Firegravel!’ She had not seen the horse-trading smuggler since she had granted the Quyr their independence from Tyrans.

  Gevenan snorted. ‘That old reprobate? Watch your belongings, legionnaire. He’ll steal the saddle from under your backside without you knowing it was gone.’

  Berg hadn’t changed. As usual, he was adorned from hair to boots with jewellery, most of it made of obsidian, the rest glass beads in a variety of colours. His pony, untied, grazed nearby. Ligea slid down from her mount and they bowed to one another in mutual respect. ‘Hoy, lady,’ he said in greeting.

  ‘What can I do for an old friend of the mountains?’ she asked, waving her guards away to a discreet distance. ‘Is my friend in need?’

  ‘The mountains call me.’

  She knew the phrase; it meant he was anxious to conclude his business and go back to where he belonged on the plateau beyond the Alps. ‘How did you know I would pass this way?’ she asked, curious.

  He tapped the beads of the necklet he wore. ‘The runes tell me. They tell me many things. They say yus get has left y’side and gone to a strange land.’

  ‘My what—? Oh, you mean Arrant. Yes, he has gone to his father in Kardiastan. One day I shall follow.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What worries you, my friend?’

  ‘The runes he wears. They ached at m’throat once, beggin’ me to gift them to him. So I did. I had another, after all. Now I wonder if I did yus all an ill turn. They are old, those runes, made by strange folk clawed like animals, coming from a land that vanished long ago, or so the legends say. Under the sea, some say. Eaten by the sands, say others. The clawed folk vanished too, along with their land and their mines.’

  Ligea frowned, looking for the relevance in what he said. ‘You think the beads might harm my son?’

  He shrugged. ‘They’ve no interest in your lad, not one way, nor t’other. Runed beads are ever tied to creatures, not men. ‘Tis why we wear them—to understand our beasts. But m’beads yearn towards his’n. I feel the tug of his’n through m’own. There be some strangeness in the air where he goes, and my runes feel the unsettling of it. The carvings twist and squirm. I know not what meaning there be in that, and there be no point in asking, because there’s none alive to tell us.’ He looked down at his necklet. ‘These rest not easy as they listen. Tell him not to wear his necklet. Would be safer that-wise.’

  She nodded. ‘I will.’

  ‘Then I’ll be gone.’ He gazed around at the plain they travelled and shuddered. ‘Flat lands attack a man’s soul. Yus are too far from the sky here.’ He took up the reins of his plateau pony and went to mount.

  ‘It wasn’t your runes that told me I’d come this way, was it?’ she asked with a smile.

  He grinned at her sheepishly. ‘No. Heard yus was in Getria. Then the tollkeeper told me yus’d come this way, so I waited.’ He pulled himself into the saddle and rode away, without looking back.

  ‘Bad news?’ Gevenan asked as Ligea remounted.

  ‘Just some superstitious nonsense.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Um, have a scribe and a courier attend me as soon as we reach the wayhouse.’

  He sucked in his cheeks. ‘Right. Always wise to record the ravings of prophets and shamans.’

  ‘Shut up, Gev, or I’ll stuff a piece of Berg’s bearskin down your throat.’

  He laughed and rode on.

  ‘Superstitious nonsense,’ she thought. ‘That’s all it is. A stone necklet can’t hurt anyone…can it?’

  Ungar was a Magoria in her thirties who loved teaching the beginners’ class. None of her pupils was over six years old, and that was the way she liked it. She loved the way they had such fun with the weak power of their gems; she loved the way they grew in pride as they first learned to manipulate that power to do simple things, such as find someone in a game of hide-and-seek, or see objects placed at a distance, or hear words whispered on the other side of the grounds. There were so many games you could play with small children, and they never tired of them.

  Arrant was different. For a start, he was over thirteen and, although polite enough, he was also aloof. He didn’t want to play games; he wanted to learn. He desperately wanted to learn. She could sense that much.

  Temellin had called her in to assess the lad so that they would have an idea of where to place him—which was wise of the Mirager, as trying to assess Arrant himself would have been a disaster—but she wished he hadn’t then stayed in the room, watching. The boy was nervous enough without the father he scarcely knew sitting there observing. But he was the Mirager, and much older than she was as well, so she didn’t have the gall to tell him to leave. She wished she was like Garis, who, although the same age as she was, would have sent the Mirager packing without a qualm.

  Poor Arrant. He seemed so unhappy, and he must have been tired. He’d only arrived the evening before, and here he was, first thing in the morning, being put through his paces like a thoroughbred mount that had been bought sight unseen from a shleth trader. He looked as if he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep, too.

  She chatted to him for a while, trying to put him at ease, telling him about how classes were selected according to talent, not age, and how it was perfectly possible to be advanced in one aspect of Magoroth studies and elementary in another.

  ‘So we need to find out just where to slot you in for all the different aspects of cabochon usage,’ she said brightly, trying not to be depressed by his solemn intensity. If only he would smile, he’d be an attractive lad. He had his father’s good looks…‘Warding, far-sensing, battle, positioning, emotion-reading, cloaking and so on. So I am just going to ask you to do a
few things to see how you go.’

  He nodded, but everything about him suggested tension. He was carefully not looking at his father, for a start. The expression on his face was so wooden she suspected that it hid deep-felt misery, but she could not gain the slightest hint of his feelings.

  ‘Well, to begin with, I think we shall be placing you in the advanced class for cloaking,’ she said with a laugh.

  He looked startled. ‘Cloaking? What’s that?’

  ‘Hiding your emotions from others. You’re the only boy I know of your age who could have sat there and not leaked a thing the whole while I was talking. You can even hide your presence; did you know that? I’d have trouble knowing you were in the room if I just passed by without looking in.’

  ‘My mother did tell me that.’

  ‘It’s usually a sign of particularly strong Magor power, you know.’

  He looked surprised. ‘No, I didn’t know.’

  ‘So, let’s try something else. Call some colour up into your cabochon first.’

  He sat perfectly still, then said, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘I just did.’ He opened his hand to show the cabochon lying there in the palm. It was a pale yellow and glowed not at all.

  The simplest of all Magor abilities, available to even the youngest Theuros, and he couldn’t do it. She was appalled, and shot an alarmed look at Temellin. The Mirager did not move.

  ‘Sometimes I can,’ Arrant said. ‘Mostly, though, it just happens when it feels like it, not when I want it to.’