Isles of the Forsaken (40 page)

Looking into his eyes, Nathaway felt a painful flare of empathy. In that moment, with the blood they had mixed still fresh on the knife, he felt giddy with an exhilaration of purpose. He wanted to participate in the uplifting surrender of the Lashnura, to give himself utterly away.

“I want to help you,” he said, not expecting the old man to understand.

But Goth’s eyes seemed to see everything. Softly, he said, “I accept your offer.”

Goth’s face was bright with euphoric pain. He began trying to unbutton his collar, but his hands were shaking. Already the tips of his fingers were darkening with the disease he had taken from Spaeth’s body. “Hand me that bottle,” he said.

Nathaway fetched the blue bottle from the bureau, and uncorked it. “Give me one sliver,” Goth said.

“What is it?”

“Don’t you know?”

Nathaway shook his head. “It’s medicine,” Goth said. “It will help me.”

The bottle contained a dozen white, waxy slivers. Nathaway chose one and held it out, but Goth’s palsied hands couldn’t grasp it. The Grey Man held out his unbandaged forearm. “Under the skin,” he said. “Just over the vein.”

A little clumsy from fear of hurting him, Nathaway inserted the sharp sliver just under the skin. Goth clasped his hand over it and leaned back against the bed. Slowly, his trembling eased and his face relaxed. His head nodded, and for a moment Nathaway thought he was going to fall asleep; but, with a visible force of will, he dragged himself back. This time when he unbuttoned his collar, his hands were steady. From around his neck he took a stone pendant on a cord. He touched it tenderly, then held it out to Nathaway.

It was a rectangular slab of jade, inscribed with characters in an alphabet Nathaway didn’t recognize. Its edges were worn smooth and round by the years, and its surface was unpolished. It looked ancient.

“Take it,” Goth said. “I want you to have it.”

It was still warm with the heat of Goth’s body when Nathaway took it. “What is it?” he asked.

“It is my soulstone,” Goth said. “As it was my father’s before me, and his mother’s, clear back to the beginning. All their souls are in it.”

Immediately Nathaway assumed that Goth was giving him the family heirloom to hold in trust for Spaeth. He glanced down at her.

As if reading his thoughts, Goth said, “No, I am giving it to
you
. You must not give it away. Not to her, not to anyone, until your own soul is ready to enter it. Can I trust you?”

“If that is what you want,” Nathaway said, uncertain that the old man’s mind was sufficiently his own to make such a decision.

“It has nothing to do with me,” Goth said. “It is necessary.” He looked down at Spaeth, and his face was full of yearning. “Now you must wake her.”

Kneeling at Spaeth’s side, Nathaway gently shook her. He felt a precious tenderness for her now. They had shared something more intimate than ordinary life allowed. He knew her inside and out, as if he had explored every particle of her, looked out from her eyes, felt his own touch on her skin. He felt a sharp desire to experience that closeness again.

When her eyes flickered open and focused on his face, she looked dreamily entranced at first, as if she were just that moment discovering the most fascinating thing in the universe, and it was him. “Wake up, Spaeth,” he said, wishing she didn’t have to. She sat up, and her expression changed, but only to become a mirror of the sharp desire in his own. Then, on unpremeditated impulse, they were wrapped in each other’s arms, their mouths pressed together. He wanted desperately to be inside her body, to be closer than skin would allow. The clothes they were wearing seemed like walls between them; he wanted to rip them off.

Spaeth’s hands were already inside his shirt and he was fumbling at her belt when the fact that they weren’t alone made him summon an enormous force of will and pull back. He had to swallow twice and bite his lip to get control. Every muscle in him was superheated. He drew a ragged breath, and saw Goth’s face from the corner of his eye, looking at them with a mix of pain and tenderness.

“I had to be sure,” Goth said. “I had to know the bandhota bond was true.” He looked away then, as if the sight of them was more than he could bear.

“Goth,” Spaeth breathed, as if seeing him for the first time. She tore one hand away from Nathaway’s body to reach out to him. For an instant he seemed about to clasp it, then he drew away. A tremor passed through his body.

“No,” he said, “Don’t touch me, Spaeth. I can’t trust myself. You must leave here now, the two of you.”

“Leave?” she cried. “Without you?”

“Yes,” he said. His eyes fixed on Nathaway’s face, as if he couldn’t bear to look at Spaeth’s. “Get her out of here. Don’t let her fall into the hands of her enemies. Especially not the Innings. To them, she would only be one more object to be warped and used.”

“They won’t touch her,” Nathaway promised madly.

“Good. You must go to Lashnish, the two of you,” Goth said. “Do you understand? You must find the Isonstone. Now, do you know this palace?”

Both of them shook their heads. “I do,” Goth said bitterly. “I grew up here. The best way for you to escape is by the Gallowgate. If you cannot make it out that way, there is another way, but use it cautiously. This palace was built on a crack in the world. In the passages below us, the other circles ebb and flow into our own. When I last went that way it was a borderland. You must not stray into the realms of the Mundua, but keep to our circle.” Moving painfully, he went to the hearth and sketched out a diagram in the ash there, explaining the route. “Do you understand?”

They both nodded.

With a swipe of his hand, Goth erased the map. “Then go.”

Neither of them moved.

“Come with us,” Nathaway said. “Please. You can show us.”

Goth shook his head. “I would only draw the Innings to you. If they found I was missing, there would be a pursuit. But you can leave without suspicion, and they don’t even know Spaeth is here.” He paused. “You are her bandhota now. I know you will treasure her as I did. She needs to be free of me.”

“But I don’t
want
to be free of you!” Spaeth protested.

“Oh, my dear girl.” His face was a map of thwarted desire. “What is worthy of love in me is present in all creatures. As long as your love is fixed on a particular object, a particular person, there is some taint of self-gain in it. You must learn to purge your love until all that is left is the essence. Obliterate all that is
you
in your love, and you will find that you have obliterated all that is
me
as well.”

It seemed to Nathaway as if the Grey Man were speaking as much to himself as to Spaeth. She said in a small voice, “And what about you?”

“I will be all right,” he said. Now his eyes were fixed on something far away, beyond them. “I have discovered a new road, a strange and backward one, but I think it may lead me—well, to my heart’s desire.” For a moment an ironic smile flickered across his face. Then he turned to them sternly. “Now, go. It is not safe for you to be here.”

Nathaway rose, pulling Spaeth to her feet and toward the door. She reached out toward Goth one last time, but he turned away with a grim effort. The last sight Nathaway had of him, he was gazing into the fire like a statue of frozen misery.

*

As soon as they were out in the dark-windowed gallery, they pressed against each other and kissed again. Nathaway’s desire was blazing so hot, his body was acting on its own; everything else was burned from his mind. This time, it was Spaeth who fought for control, pausing with both hands on his face. “We’ve got to get away,” she said.

He couldn’t understand what had come over him. He felt drunk, infatuated, unable to stop touching her. But, taking a deep breath, he put his arm around her waist and made for the door.

The building had a strangely awake air for so late at night. Though the corridors were dark, twice they had to stop when they heard a door closing ahead and swift, booted footsteps receding. They heard the hum of voices before they came to a doorway that opened onto the head of a broad ceremonial staircase leading down into a large hall, brightly lit and thronged with soldiers. Sharp orders cracked like pistols, and a company formed up to march out the great double door into a courtyard.

“That is the way to the Gallowgate,” Nathaway said grimly as he and Spaeth peered down from behind a stone balustrade.

“We’ll never get out this way,” Spaeth said.

“Did you understand Goth’s map?”

“No. Did you?”

He felt far from certain. “I think so. Down, then eastward.”

They turned back into the empty corridor they had come from. Soon, coming around a corner, they saw ahead a servant woman carrying a lamp and a tray, walking away from them. Spaeth shrank back, but Nathaway boldly hailed the woman.

“Excuse me, what’s the shortest way to the kitchen?”

The woman turned, her eyes widening as the light from her lamp revealed a dishevelled Inning with a Grey Lady at his side. “Well?” Nathaway said as if he always wandered halls at night in a ripped and bloodstained shirt.

The woman recollected herself. “That door leads to a stair, sir. Can I fetch you something?” Her eyes strayed again to Spaeth.

“Show us the way,” he said.

“Follow me, sir,” she said, turning to lead them.

The stair descended past four doorways and came out into a long, arched room of pitted, smoke-stained stone. Even at this hour, the depths of the palace were stirring. Across the way an opening glowed with the orange light of the roasting pits, and farther down the hall, fire-lit steam escaped from another cavern mouth. With a rattle of wooden wheels, a boy hurried past them, pushing a handcart piled high with tubers shaped like withered hands. Another trudged past, bent under a heavy sack of lentils.

“Which way is east?” Nathaway asked their guide. She looked momentarily uncertain, then pointed left down the hall.

“Say nothing,” Spaeth told her gravely.

They passed by gnarled rock arches that opened into the bakery, glowing with the heat of brick ovens, its floor sanded with flour; and the slaughter room where carcasses hung over stone troughs, slowly draining of blood. Beyond this, the huge corridor grew dark. Nathaway paused to take a mirror-backed lamp down from a hook. Spaeth did the same, but blew her lamp out to save the oil.

The floor sloped down. More openings gaped on either side, barred with steel grates. In the dark beyond one cave mouth they could hear the rustle of movement; the smell told them that here lay the pens for the animals waiting in perpetual darkness for the slaughter room. As Nathaway’s light passed the next cave mouth, storage bins full of turnips the size of children’s skulls loomed from the dark.

At last the corridor ended in a rockfall where the great ceiling had caved in. On the left-hand side, half blocked by rubble, was a small doorway barred and locked with an iron grate. A chill wind blew out from it, smelling unpleasant.

Nathaway’s lamp flickered as he shone it on the lock; it was rusted into a lump.

“Try it,” Spaeth said.

Nathaway grasped the lock; it crumbled in his hand. He gave a jerk and the grill rained down in fragments. He kicked away the remainder and bent almost double to enter the low door. A flight of stone steps led down, and he followed them till they ended in oily black water.

As he turned back, he realized that Spaeth had not followed him down the steps. Panic shot through him, and he dashed back up, his heart racing wildly. She was standing at the top, just inside the grate. He pressed her close to him till the feeling of empty desolation subsided. “Don’t do that to me,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you.”

She drew back, studying his face in the dim lamplight. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How can we be bandhotai? Did I give dhota for you?”

“No,” he said. “Goth gave it for you. I . . .” He stopped, uncertain what he had done. Never had he felt this way before, nor acted so unlike himself. All he knew was that being parted from her was like having a limb severed. “I helped, I think,” he said.

She touched his face with fingers that gave him an electric thrill. “Innings can’t give dhota, can they?” she whispered.

“No,” he said. “Not that I know. Of course, I don’t know anyone who’s ever tried. Why would we?”

“I don’t even know what to call you,” she said. “Talley, that’s all I remember.”

“Call me Nat. That’s what my family does.”

The island under them growled in a deep-buried throat. Crumbled mortar sifted down as bricks in the arched ceiling grated against each other like red teeth. Spaeth looked up, alarmed.

“What is it?” he said.

“The Mundua. They are very close, here. We need to get away. Sacred horns, they are angry at us!”

Once, he would have dismissed her words as quaint superstition. But the memory of the last time they had been together flashed strongly onto his mind. He glanced down the steps. “This passage just leads to the sewer. Should we search for another way?”

She stood paralyzed, obviously afraid to go on, but equally reluctant to go back. He took her hand. “We’re going on,” he said. “At least the soldiers will never follow us.”

The water in the drain was only ankle-deep, but bone-chillingly cold. It was flowing sluggishly eastward, into an arched brickwork tunnel. Underfoot was a clammy muck that oozed into Nathaway’s shoes. As they splashed on into the tunnel, invisible cobweb strands brushed his face.

At length his straining eyes made out a glimmer of light ahead, reflecting on the scummy water. As they came up, it turned out to be torchlight filtering down through a grate in the high ceiling, dimly lighting the slippery stream on the floor. A metal ladder led up to the grate. Nathaway had put his foot on the first rung when they heard tramping footsteps approaching. The light was briefly cut off as a troop of soldiers passed overhead, then on. They both flinched back into the darkness.

“Where are we?” Spaeth whispered.

“Beneath the plaza in front of the palace, I think.” Shouted orders filtered down from above. “We can’t go that way. The place is crawling with soldiers. We’d be seen in a second.”