The Aware

Book 0: Isles of Glory

by Glenda Larke

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

A halfbreed's search for a mysterious slave woman leads her to a lawless land of dark dunmagic and an evil that poses a threat to all the Isles of Glory.

Release date: December 21, 2017

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 400

Sample

So you want to know what the Isles of Glory were like back then, eh? In the days before the Change, in the years before you people found us—and we found out that we weren’t the only islands in the ocean. That was a shock, I can tell you! But you know about that.

What you want to hear is quite different. You want to know about our lives. I’m not sure I’m the person to tell you, mind; I was always more one for thinking and acting rather than talking. Still, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about the Isles then, and most of it I remember better than what happened yesterday. I’d visited every islandom, except for the Dustels, before I was twenty-five, and the Dustels didn’t exist then anyway.

Yet it’s hard to know where I should start. The islandoms were more diverse then than they are now, you see: each had its own way of doing things, its own way of looking at life. The people differed from island group to island group. After the Change there was more uniformity; after you people happened along, the differences faded still more.

Perhaps the Keeper Isles would be the logical place to begin because they were at the centre of things. But no, I think I’ll start with a place that wasn’t even a proper islandom: Gorthan Spit. It wasn’t a proper island either, if it comes to that. True, it took a few days to sail the length of it, but you could have walked the width in less than a single day. There was one raised patch of rock on the north coast, but the sea cliffs there were hardly higher than the main mast of your sailing ship. The rest of the place was just white sand: think of a silver sand-eel, long and thin, with a bit of a scab on the middle of its back, and there you have Gorthan Spit. Not the sort of place where things of import would occur, or so you’d think; yet if I tell you what happened there it’ll not only show you what the Isles of Glory were like before the Change, but it’ll help to explain the Change, because the seeds of that were sown on the Spit, although none of us who did the planting realised it then!

And if nothing else, the story will tell you what it was like to be a woman and a halfbreed back in those days. And that’s really the sort of thing you want to know, isn’t it? Don’t look so surprised! I may not be as schooled as you are, but I’ve lived long enough to hear what is not spoken. I know what you are interested in. You may give it a fancy name, and call it science, or what is it? Ethnography? But render it down, and it’s just people and places…people like me, and places like Gorthan Spit.

The Spit was one of the Souther Islands, a middenheap for unwanted human garbage and the dregs of humanity; a cesspit where the Isles of Glory threw their living sewerage: the diseased, the criminals, the mad, the halfbreeds, the citizenless. Without people, Gorthan Spit would have been just an inhospitable finger of sand under a harsh southern sun; with them it was a stinking island hell.

The first time I went there I swore I’d never go back. The time I’m going to tell you about was my third visit and I was still swearing the same thing, even while I cursed the sheer perversity of the events that had made a trip there necessary.

You had to be mad, or bad, or just plain greedy to go to Gorthan Spit voluntarily. In those days there were many who said I was the first, a few who swore, with reason, that I was the second, but I’d only admit to the third. Mind you, I had reason to be greedy. My purse might have been filled with fish scales for all the weight there ever was in it and that was reason enough. Money and I just didn’t seem to get along—no, that isn’t quite true. I could make money all right, I just didn’t seem able to keep it. I’d made two fortunes before this particular trip to Gorthan Spit and lost them both. The first went down with a ship in a whirlstorm and very nearly took me with it; the second, over two thousand setus, was stolen when I was thrashing around in bed with the six-day fever. I almost died that time too.

Anyway, there I was, prompted by my search for wealth into returning to Gorthan Spit, and wondering if it was a good move. So far that third fortune seemed very elusive.

I rented a room in the main port of Gorthan Docks, in the best inn on the island: The Drunken Plaice, which meant that I actually had a room to myself, with a window, and it had a bed instead of just a pallet. I doubted that there was any difference in the vermin between Gorthan Spit’s best hostelry and its worst, but one could always hope. I’d even managed to get some hot water out of the drudge for a wash. The clam shell that acted as a basin was small and none too clean and the water was half salt, but I knew better than to complain. I washed and went downstairs to try the food in the taproom.

I took a seat in the corner where I could see the rest of the room—a wise precaution in a place like Gorthan Docks—slipped off my sword harness, and looked around. The room hadn’t changed much in the intervening years: a little more dirt ingrained into the driftwood floorboards and a few more knife gouges in the table tops, but otherwise it was as I remembered: bare necessities, no fripperies. With a first cursory glance, I saw pretty much the people I expected to see as well: a number of slavers; a few seamen-traders who were probably pirates on the side, and an assortment of unsavoury characters who had only one thing in common: they all looked as villainous as sharks on the prowl. In Gorthan Spit people came and went like the tide and it had been five years since my last trip, but there were one or two familiar faces.

I attracted a fair amount of attention myself. Any woman on her own in such a place would have, but one as tall as I was really swung the heads around. I heard the sniggers and the tired jokes I’d heard a hundred times before; I tended to have that effect on people. To be fair, even without my height I would perhaps have excited comment: I wore a Calmenter sword on my back and there weren’t too many women who did that, especially not ones with the colouring that made it clear they weren’t from Calment. Calmenters were invariably honey-eyed blondes; I was brown—brown-haired in those days, as well as brown-skinned, while my eyes were the kind of green you sometimes see in clear water along the Atis coast of Breth Island. And that was a combination which made it obvious I was a halfbreed. In those days, everyone knew that green eyes were the exclusive property of the Fen islanders, and the Fen islanders weren’t brown-skinned Souther people…

Of course, halfbreeds were a setu a score on a place like Gorthan Spit, but I was distinctive enough to be noticeable.

While waiting to be served, I took a second, more careful look around that room, and saw to my surprise that it contained no less than three tall men. It was second nature to me to notice a tall man; not that I had anything against shorter men, you understand, but I’d found over the years that a normal-sized male who could bring himself to bed a woman more than a head taller than he was, was rare indeed. The trouble was, there weren’t all that many men who were as tall as I was. To find three of them in one room was unexpected—and promising.

I should have known I was looking at trouble. That kind of luck can never be all good. Especially when all three of them were handsome.

The first, the tallest of the three, was seated with the slavers. He looked faintly familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before. He was close enough for me to see his earlobe tattoo: a ‘Q’ inlaid with gold. Which made him a Northman, a Quiller Islander. He was well dressed, too smart for a slaver, I would have thought, and he was long and lithe rather than big. Fair-skinned and dark-haired with a pleasing smile, he was about the finest-looking male I’d seen in a sea full of islands. Moreover he noticed me—and liked what he saw. The smile really was charming.

The second man, while not as tall, was a great deal larger. Broad hands, broad shoulders, broad chest, and not an ounce of excess flesh on him. He sat alone in the corner diagonally opposite from me: a handsome man with a humourless expression, tan-coloured skin, shrewd blue eyes and a complete lack of flamboyance in the way he was dressed (all in black); a man who took life seriously and yet didn’t wear a sword—a surprising omission. Perhaps he thought his large size was protection enough. He looked at me without any change in expression. And that piqued; men usually showed some reaction.

The third was the youngest. Too young for me. He looked about twenty, but he might have been a little older; fair-skinned, fair-haired and a face that was so innocent of guile you wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in a midden like Gorthan Spit. He had dimples, for godsake, and lashes that hit his cheeks like the curling foam of a wave hitting the beach. When he saw me his eyes registered his distaste. He didn’t like low-life halfbreeds.

My stomach knotted with anger. Nobody should have had the right to look at me with such contempt, especially not a man as young and as untried as this one. It was at moments like this that I would have done anything—almost anything at all—to have had a citizenship tattoo on my earlobe.

For all my inner anger, I returned his gaze calmly enough. I’d had plenty of practice at ignoring contempt.

I was about to switch my attention back to one of the other two when the waiter lurched over from a neighbouring table and asked what I wanted. I knew the answer to that one: fish. In that hostelry there was never anything else but fish. And I doubted that I had much choice about the way in which it was cooked, not unless the culinary standards had done an about-face since I’d last stayed at The Drunken Plaice.

‘Grilled fish,’ I said, ‘and a mug of swillie.’ And then I had a whiff of dunmagic that prickled my spine in warning and made me take a very good look at that waiter.

He wasn’t an attractive sight. He was in his middle years, I supposed, but it was hard to tell because he was only half normal. The right half. The left half of him was a travesty of a human being, and I didn’t really need the stink of dunmagic to tell me he had been its victim. It was as if a giant had pinched his left-hand side between two fingers, squashing it out of shape to make that side of his face a twisted mess and that side of his torso a humped deformity. His left eye drooped down, the left side of his mouth jerked up. The cheek between, as rough as dead coral, was pitted with scars. The jaw below petered away without definition into his neck. His left foot was clubbed, his left hand a set of gnarled claws at the end of a foreshortened limb. The lobe of his left ear was missing, deliberately cut away, taking with it any proof of his citizenship—or lack of it. What made it all worse was that there was enough of him that was normal to indicate he had once been at least as handsome as the Quillerman sitting with the slavers. For one fleeting moment I glimpsed something disturbing deep in his eyes: tragedy. A tragedy of such epic proportions as to be beyond the understanding of most people: more than even I could begin to comprehend.

I was stirred to compassion, and that didn’t happen very often. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked and held out a coin to show that the inquiry was made with the best of intentions. On Gorthan Spit you had to be damned careful about asking personal questions.

He leered at me, and a dribble of spit ran out of his twisted mouth down onto his chin. ‘You can call me Janko. Any time you want, jewel-eyes.’ He managed to drawl out that last sentence into an obscene suggestion, then he grabbed the coin, laughed in a high-pitched giggle that seemed curiously at variance with his appearance, and stumped away.

I sighed. So much for compassion in a public house like The Drunken Plaice. I wondered if I was growing soft; there had been a time when I would never have wasted a moment’s pity on such an unprepossessing specimen. Perhaps I was mellowing with age, as pearls do… The thought brought me no joy. For a person with my disadvantages, the anger the fair youngster’s contempt had aroused in me was of more value than any feelings of compassion could be. I needed to be as hard and as rough as the shell of the oyster, not smooth like its pearl. To be soft was to jeopardise my dream of attaining wealth, of having enough money to buy the comfort and security I wanted. Bleeding hearts were rarely rich. Worse, in my line of business, they too often ended up dead.

The swillie came quickly enough, delivered by the tapboy who was probably more in need of my compassion than Janko, if the bruises on his cheek were anything to go by. I smiled at him but he ducked his head, dumped the mug down spilling some of its contents, and scuttled away as fast as he could. I didn’t usually scare people that much. I settled back to sip the brew and watch the room.

And found I hadn’t reached the end of the surprises the place had to offer, for just then the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life came down the stairs into the room. She was a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, golden-skinned dream; a Cirkasian, of course. No other islands produced that kind of colouring. She wasn’t much older than twenty; she had legs long enough to set every man in the room drooling, and curves that were just obvious enough to hint at sexual pleasures without being too flagrant. Like me, she was wearing the drab standard travellers’ garb of trousers and a belted tunic, but it wouldn’t have made any difference what she wore; every head in the room swivelled her way—and stayed looking.

Including my own. I’d never wanted to bed another woman—still don’t, if it comes to that; it wasn’t her sexual attributes that interested me. Yet I edged the empty chair opposite me into a more inviting position with my foot and hoped, without much reason, that she’d settle for my table. A bird, a small nondescript blackish thing, flew in and perched on the back of the chair instead. Apparently fearless, it cocked its head at me, and eyed the crumbs on the floor. I tried to shoo it off, but it ignored me.

The woman paused on the bottom step and looked around the room for a place to sit. There wasn’t all that much choice: the seat at my table, several empty chairs at the tall, broad man’s table, another next to the young man with the curling lashes. The bird hopped, agitated, along the chair back. When a sunbeam caught its plumage, it turned iridescent with a shimmer of deep blue on the wings and purple across the breast, like a bolt of shot silk catching the light.

That was when the stench of dunmagic evil hit me, so potent I almost gagged. The whiff I had caught earlier from Janko was nothing compared to this; that had been the traces of a past spell, this was immediate. Someone was operating right then and there, and he—or she—had to be a dunmaster. This was no novice, no small-time operator with a modicum of talent. I’d never sensed such power, and I’d never been so aware of the sheer badness of dunmagic before. The place fairly reeked with evil. I put my mug down before I spilled the contents, and made sure my sword hilt was within easy reach.

A red glow skittered across the floor, intangible and rotten, touching us all with its foulness as it ran between the chairs to leave patches of ruddiness behind like bloodied turds. It was an effort not to jerk my feet away as it streamed under my table and over my boots, tainting them with colour. I wanted to shake my feet—as if I could rid myself of the residue it left—but I withstood the temptation. It was safer not to let the dunmaster, whoever he or she was, have an inkling that I could see it. I did risk another downward glance a moment later, to see that the red glow on the leather of my boots was fast fading, but I hid my relief just as I had hidden my revulsion. I almost regretted having Awareness. Without it, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing; I would have been as oblivious to the danger as everyone else.

I took a deep breath, and tried to isolate the power to pinpoint who was using it, and—perhaps even more importantly—who was the victim of it. And, for the first time in my life, I failed miserably. The power was too great; it permeated the whole room and I could not track it down. I’d never seen the red taint of dunmagic spread so widely before. I’d never seen it roil on its evil way so strongly. The only thing I could be reasonably certain of was that it wasn’t directed at me. Still, my mouth dried out; my clenched hands were clammy. I wasn’t used to my Awareness failing me and I was frightened.

God, the things I did for money! I should never have returned to the Spit; too much that was bad could happen there, especially when magic was involved. I felt a momentary doubt about whether it was all worth it: a chilling notion that crept up on me like an unexpected rain-squall, and was quickly thrust away.

Janko lurched across the room to deliver my fish, the bird on the back of the chair near mine flew off and the girl on the stairs made up her mind. She ignored a seaman-trader who had tipped a drunken companion out of his chair and was patting the empty place invitingly. She walked across to the youngster with the eyelashes. I could have sworn he actually blushed when he saw where she was headed. He stood up, came close to knocking over his chair, swallowed in embarrassment, sat down again and gave a good imitation of a man hit over the head with a cudgel. The girl smiled a smile that would have charmed even Janko on a bad day, and sat down.

I turned my attention to my fish. I wanted to get out of the taproom quickly; if there was anything I didn’t need, it was to be mixed up in dunmagic.

I had almost picked the fish bones clean when the empty chair next to me squeaked across the floor and I looked up to find the Quillerman, that lithe length of male beauty from the slavers’ table, slipping into the seat. The charming smile I’d already noted tilted not only his lips but also the corners of his eyes as he said, ‘Niamor. Also known as the Negotiator.’ The name had the same faint familiarity as his face.

I reciprocated with a smile and gave the only name I’d ever considered to be mine, although I’d used a number of others at various times. ‘Blaze Halfbreed.’

He looked a little startled. The last name I used was obviously contrived, and it must have puzzled him that I had chosen to accentuate my status in such a way; he wasn’t to know that perversity always had been a fault of mine. Still, he didn’t remark on it. He said, ‘I’ve seen you before somewhere.’

‘Perhaps. I’ve been in the Docks before.’

He clicked his fingers. ‘I remember! You were here, oh, five years or so ago, looking for work as I recall. You finally shipped out as a deckhand on a slaver.’ He gave a chuckle. ‘I never expected to see you alive again. That ship had a reputation, it did. Some said its captain was a dunmagicker.’

I grimaced at the memory. ‘They were right.’ It had been a hellish voyage and I’d almost ended up as food for a sea-dragon, but I’d been offered a lot of money to wangle myself on board that ship as a crewmember and there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for money in those days. I doubted I would do it now; I was a shade more cautious. And possibly a shade less greedy.

‘You arrived this morning,’ he remarked.

I nodded. We were getting down to business.

‘I believe you’re still interested in the slave trade. I hear you’ve been asking around for a slave. Before you even got a room here.’

I poked into the fish head, extracting the last bit of succulent meat from the triangle above the eye. ‘That’s right.’ Typical of Gorthan Docks: gossip travelled as fast as the smell of rotten prawns, and everybody minded everyone else’s business, or tried to, if they could do it discreetly.

He persevered. ‘And you want a very particular piece of merchandise.’

The sweet morsel of fish melted in my mouth. Not even The Drunken Plaice could entirely ruin fresh solfish. I said, offhand, ‘My employer is very particular in his tastes.’

‘ “A Cirkasian woman. Must be young.” They come expensive, they do.’ His eyes slid across to the Cirkasian beauty at the next table, assessing her potential as a slave with callous dispassion.

I pushed my plate aside. ‘Uh-uh. Don’t even think it, Niamor. In case you haven’t noticed, that woman has class. I don’t want any trouble. I’ll take one that’s already a slave, not a lady who doubtless has backup somewhere or other.’

He shrugged regretfully. ‘That might be more difficult.’

‘I understand that there was a boat in from Cirkase with a cargo just yesterday.’

‘True. But the merchandise was direct from Cirkasian jails, courtesy of the Castlelord himself. The Castlelord takes a very dim view of the export of Cirkasian lovelies to the slave trade, but he doesn’t mind foisting his male crims on to the unsuspecting public.’

I snorted. From what I’d heard, the Castlelord of the Cirkase Islands would have sold his own mother if the sale had brought him enough money and no trouble. He and the Bastionlord of Breth who ruled another of the Middling Isles were both tyrants of the worst kind, and the world would have been a better place without either of them, but I kept that view to myself. I’d discovered it didn’t pay to make political statements; they had a habit of being repeated just when you wanted to appear neutral.

‘Look about for me, will you?’ I asked. ‘I’ve a feeling you can find me a suitable candidate if you put your mind to it. What’s your fee?’

‘Five percent. Plus expenses.’

I nodded. ‘Just don’t pad the expenses.’ I had no intention of ever paying him anyway, any more than I intended to pay for the slave, if I ever found her.

The business disposed of, he moved on to the personal. (He had his priorities right, Niamor. Doubtless he wasn’t called the Negotiator for nothing.) He nodded at my sword. ‘Your employer a Calmenter?’

‘Perhaps. What does it matter?’

‘It doesn’t. I’m just interested, that’s all. I heard the Calmenters don’t make their swords for just anybody. Very proud of their workmanship, the Calmenters. I did hear they’d only make a sword for an off-islander if there was a blood-debt involved.’

‘You may be right,’ I said, noncommittal. He was right, of course; the sword was payment for a debt. I’d once saved the life of the son of the Governor of Calment Minor. I might even have told the story to him if it hadn’t been for that dunmagic in the air. For all I knew, Niamor could have been the source of it, and not even his extraordinary good looks and charm were going to entice me into a non-business relationship until I was sure he wasn’t. Pity really, because just looking at him was enough to have me feeling randy. It had been quite some time since I’d had a man in my bed.

I finished my swillie and stood up. ‘I have a room here if you have any business to offer.’ I nodded affably and started towards the stairs. On my way I glanced across at the Cirkasian, thinking that a beauty like her didn’t belong in a place like this, any more than the youth she was sitting with did. She wouldn’t last twenty-four hours unless she found herself a protector. Always assuming, of course, that she hadn’t been the source of the dunmagic. But if she wasn’t, she’d made a bad choice of table; she would have done better to sit at mine. I didn’t give a damn about her safety, naturally, but I would have been prepared to offer her protection in exchange for information, whereas that pretty lad would be as much use to her as a mast without a sail—the fundamentals were fine, but without the right accoutrements, what’s the point?

I gave a mental shrug and started up the stairs.

Just as I reached the first landing I looked back, and my eyes met those of the tall, broad man, the sober Southerman dressed in black. His face had not changed, yet something made me stop. A strong emotion: recognition. His…or mine? Strangely, I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him before, and his face still seemed without expression—yet the emotion hung there in the air between us.

I felt about as happy as a crab about to be dropped into boiling water; intuitive feelings always meant trouble.

Fearful of what I couldn’t understand, I turned and went on up the stairs.

Once in my room I barred the door and flung open the window shutters to take a deep breath. It was a relief to leave the stench of dunmagic behind, even if the alternative was the strong scent of fish. My room overlooked the drying racks of the fishermen’s wharf, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if I’d had a room on the other side of the building. Fresh fish, salted fish, pickled fish, dried fish, smoked fish, rotting fish—everywhere you turned on Gorthan Spit there were fish. Fish flopping in boat holds, fish roasting inside ovens, fish drying on racks, fish pickling in barrels, fish preserving in smoke-houses, fish being scaled, gutted, filleted, dried, fried, skewered, barbecued, sold, eaten. When you walked the streets anywhere in the Docks, dried fish scales a handspan deep scrunched underfoot. You think I exaggerate? Well then, you’ve never been to Gorthan Spit.

Right then, beyond the drying racks, seven or eight fisher folk were seated on fish boxes grouped around wicker baskets of fresh solfish, some of which gave proof of their freshness by flopping out onto the rough boards of the wharf. The fisher folk, both men and women, were gutting their catch with deft skill. Innards and scales flew, along with laughter and coarse chatter. I wondered what they found to laugh about; it was hot out there, even in the shade of the inn, and I wouldn’t have liked their job.

I raised my eyes. Further away, on the other side of the wharf, I had a view of a row of ramshackle buildings. The predominant method of construction in the Docks was to hammer together whatever materials were to hand and to stop when you ran out of anything you could use. In this land without trees, most building supplies came—in one way or another—from the sea, although on my first visit to the Spit I’d seen a hostelry built entirely out of beer barrels and a shop with walls made of empty bottles. In the row I was looking at, most were obviously fashioned from general flotsam that included tree trunks, hull staves and deck planks. The nearest house had made extensive use of whalebones, another had a roof of shark skin and walls of barnacle-encrusted wood from a shipwreck. The overall effect was bizarre, yet not without a sort of misshapen charm.

(I must have been out of my mind. Did I ever think that? Gorthan Docks? Charming?)

I couldn’t see much of the rest of the port from my window, but as the coast curved outwards after the town ended, I could just make out, in the far distance, the beach beyond and the steep-sided dunes that rose behind the shore. The white sands there danced in the heat haze and shimmers of dune mirage dissolved into the air.

I closed the shutters, blocking out the light along with a little of the heat. I slipped out of my boots, unfastened my sword and lay down on the bed. I was going to be up most of the night and I needed to sleep first.

I was awoken about an hour later by the sound of someone groaning. The noise was so close I thought they must actually be in my room. They weren’t, of course; it was just that the walls of The Drunken Plaice were built of driftwood planks so warped and poorly fitted together that whatever went on next-door could be clearly heard through numerous cracks and chinks. I tried to ignore the sounds, but there was no way I was ever going to be able to get back to sleep while someone did a good imitation of a death rattle in my ear. I sighed, strapped on my sword and padded out in my bare feet.

As it was still afternoon I didn’t take a light—a mistake because the narrow passageway was as dark as it was airless. Away from the outside smells I scented dunmagic again, and my insides tightened. Distracted by the stink, I foolishly took a step into the darkness right into the path of someone passing my door; I had an impression that the room next-door was also his destination.

For some long moments we both stood still, so close that our bodies were actually touching. I couldn’t see him well but I knew exactly who it was: the tall Southerman dressed in black. The serious one. What I couldn’t understand was the effect he had on me. Ordinarily, in a situation like that, I would have stepped back and apologised—hand on sword hilt just in case—but we stood there, nearly nose to nose, and a whole gamut of emotions tumbled about in my mind and my body. The trouble was, I couldn’t decide what they were trying to tell me.

The predominant feeling was again one of recognition, possibly his, and equally possibly mine. Was my Awareness acknowledging the presence of a dunmaster or a sylvtalent, or recognising a kindred Awareness? Or was my memory telling me I should know this man? It might even have been my physical needs recognising a man who could have satisfied them…

When I did step back I was breathless. With fear, certainly, but also with a tension I couldn’t identify. Part of me wanted to turn and run.

Before either of us spoke, the groaning from the other side of the door resumed with sharper pathos.

‘T