Last True World (Dica Series Book 3) Read online

  Last True World

  Book 3 of the Dica Series

  (Revised Edition)

  Clive S. Johnson

  Daisy Bank

  This eBook edition first published in 2012

  Revised Edition for formatting changes published in June 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Clive S. Johnson, 2012 (2014)

  Ver 1010/1

  The right of Clive S. Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the author, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  All artwork; cover, maps and illustrations by the author. Copyright applicable.

  Also by Clive S. Johnson

  The Dica Series

  Leiyatel’s Embrace (Book 1)

  Of Weft and Weave (Book 2)

  Cold Angel Days (Book 4)

  An Artist’s Eye (Book 5)

  Starmaker Stella (Book 6)

  I dedicate this novel to those many kind readers who reviewed my earlier volumes - mostly before the Dica Series was born - and who unknowingly lent much of the narrative for this very volume.

  i Maps

  Table of Contents

  Also by Clive S. Johnson

  i Maps

  1 End of a Dream

  2 So Near Yet So Far

  3 Where Snakes Bear Omens

  4 For Want of No Man but One

  5 She Will Sup at Her Own Breast

  6 From Whence Their Ships Came In

  7 A Journey Never Made

  8 A Collision of Thoughts

  9 Naningemynd Remembered

  10 Only Now a True Fledgling

  11 To Culture Credence

  12 Between True Worlds

  13 Let Battle Commence

  14 To Bear Witness

  15 To a Storm-Tossed Canvas Sea

  16 Symbolism’s Scant Sense

  17 Mirabel’s Maturity Ball

  18 An Uncle’s Gift

  19 A Gift Unwrapped

  20 A Mind to the Unlikely

  21 An Unsuitable Suitor

  22 The First Step is a Journey Made

  23 Of Pressing Concern

  24 An Impatient Nature

  25 Across the Field of Battle

  26 A Wealcan Ride to Baradcar

  27 Nature Takes the High Ground

  28 Fingers and Thumbs

  29 A Moment Embraced

  30 A Plain or Purled Path?

  31 A Phantom Visitation

  32 When an Opponent’s Down

  33 A Long Lost Love

  34 When Truth’s Denial Fails

  35 A Turn for the Better

  36 Delaying Tactics

  37 Nephril’s Lament

  38 To Glimpse a Lost World

  39 Clash of Kempers

  40 A Chase Begun

  41 The Heat of Battle

  42 A Persistent Gain

  43 On Which Side to Fall

  44 A Stitch in Time

  45 Battle or Balance

  46 Dream of an End

  47 A Herald’s Mixed Message

  48 Only Time Will Tell

  49 And Time Did Tell of Time

  50 Where the Stars Do Live

  Appendix - Aoide tar Degan

  About the Author

  1 End of a Dream

  To the rose! The rose, its ruby expanses furled to a terrain of inescapable crags and crannies, explored only by those black and yellow striped wanderers drawn there by the promise of its sweet delight of nectar. To the rose, set against a salmon-pink sky, a dark silhouette seemingly defying the cool, fresh air its inevitable cerise stain of a rising sun, a sun to mark the start of yet another summer’s day.

  Still and stark and solitary, a narrow vase keeps a strident head held high atop its water-borne stem; a green-brown, thorny slash clothed only in a waistcoat of roe-like rowndells. About it, about the rose and vase and air-speckled water, ne’er a breath of breeze was blown, and so all seemed frozen. As lifeless as the wings of a butterfly, long pinned to a museum’s dry and dusty display.

  An errant bubble broke free and jostled past others, nudging lose one or two more. Where the stem cranked at an absent petiole, they all floated free, rose through the water and soon gathered below its viscous skin. Three they were, but not yet free, barred from escape by their diminutive size, by the water and air conspiring to make a hide too thick to pierce.

  The greater host of bubbles left behind - those still clinging to the stem below – now all grew more restless, began to jostle one against the other and so whisper of freedom. Their foment soon shook them free, unclothing the stem as the vase itself hummed a high-strung song of release. Strangely, the glass set the tune with its foot, scuffed and scraped its quivering notes against the sill upon which it stood, but only for a short while longer.

  Somehow it seemed to find just the right pitch for, it soon crept forward across the sill; as if in a skirt too tight, upon shoes too dainty and heels too high until it suddenly fell to the floor and smashed.

  Shards sharply scattered across the stone-flagged floor whilst the spilt water soon wicked into a rug close by, its stark shard-pattern darkening along one edge. The room once more fell silent but for Nephril’s short and snuffling snort as he turned over in bed.

  Moments later, the door flew open.

  “What was that? Are you alright, Nephril? What in Dica’s going on?” Penolith’s large, brown eyes seemed even larger now. They flicked about the room, soon finding cause but little explanation.

  Her fraught stare returned to Nephril just as he was opening his own grey eyes, and before staring back at her, plainly confused. “I had a dream, dear, a most strange one at that.”

  “But the vase, Nephril, how did it...”

  “I dreamt I kept company with a very old friend.”

  “But the glass, my sweet, it’s dangerous, I need to get it swept up before...”

  “A very old and good friend, one of many years, many, many years - some few hundred at least.”

  “Very good, Nephril, but please bear with me whilst I go find Cresmol.”

  She rose but then saw how small and pitiful Nephril looked, almost swamped by his bed, and her heart promised to break. Despite the threat to bare feet, she couldn’t resist his earnest voice. “I dreamt of a friend named Falmeard, dost thou know that, mine dear? A sweet but lost soul, yet a lost soul who bore a ring.”

  Being careful where she trod, Penolith moved Nephril away from his pillow, so she could prop another behind.

  “It was so real, Penolith, dost thou know that? So real, yet for the life of me I cannot remember anyone with that name. Can thee? I can see him still, though, see him so clearly before me.”

  “Just a dream, my worrisome Master of Ceremonies, maybe only...”

  “It were as though I remembered it from only a few years ago, as if from another world not unlike our own, somehow a recent memory I never did have.”

  Penolith’s features filled with an unwanted but frequent visitor, a worry that found easy and well-worn place amongst the many new creases and folds of her face. Until quite recently she’d managed to keep the sadness and fear confined to her eyes but they no longer had room enough. She hadn’t realised just how still sh
e’d become, how she wrung her hands, bit her lip and stared from her heavy eyes down onto Nephril’s vacantly upturned face.

  Although she already knew the answer, she asked anyway. “So, just what was this friend doing in your dream, my love?”

  In the growing dawn chorus, breaking in waves against the open window, Nephril tried to remember the dream, but by now Francis and the ring were no more.

  2 So Near Yet So Far

  Steward Melkin Mudark missed the persistent rumble the mill’s waterwheel had given the college during its first sixty years. He missed the deeply reassuring but irregular clunks, knocks and short, silent gaps of anticipation - a reassurance the body felt more than the ears heard. The stoom engine had finally replaced the waterwheel, much against his own wishes, and had usurped the familiar lurching gait of discovery with the fast high-step of more ordered progress.

  He knew all the arguments, the efficiencies, the benefits, but still hankered after preserving the old ways. He’d really wanted to keep the college dependent on water for it had for so long set the pace and rhythm for his thoughts. Somehow he now felt cut off from all inspiration, his fount of ideas obscured behind the incessant and lifeless buzz of steam.

  He knew now that he should have granted leave the year before, when the proposed engine at that time had been the old one-jar kind, its long transom and weighty wheel limiting its speed to no more than a laboured lilt, not unlike the old waterwheel itself.

  Shaftrake’s many-jarred improvement had done away with the transom, and the need to carry the engine’s labour - within the mass of a huge wheel - through its idling arcs. Without all that weight, the new stoom engines could fair clatter along, almost like the many looms they now almost exclusively drove.

  The appearance this morning of the man now standing before him, and the fact he was empty-handed, brought a far greater need for inspiration, making Melkin Mudark despise the new stoom engine even more. All its incessant noise let him do was to marvel at how colourful Dialwatcher’s face had become; purple, blue and yellow stains streaked vertically, black, crazed, vein-like lines running amok amongst them. It didn’t help that Dialwatcher himself looked decidedly annoyed.

  “Exactly how near did you manage to get?” Lady Lambsplitter was asking, her mind clear and decisive as usual.

  Dialwatcher’s disfigurement didn’t appear to extend to his voice. “In amongst the honeycombed support below t’island, me Lady, but only a few steps up t’ladder.”

  “Nowhere near near enough then,” she said, more to herself than Dialwatcher. She eyed him as she thought, a thick and dark eyebrow lofting before she asked, “And you feel well enough in yourself now?”

  “Enough to stay upright and be able to walk ... my Lady.”

  Where Lambsplitter could now quietly think, Melkin could only feel guilt. “Are you sure you’re alright, Master Dialwatcher? Sure you’re not just saying that ... you know, to make me feel better?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Here, come on, chap, sit thee thesen down here and take the weight off thee feet.” Melkin drew a chair away from the desk and briefly patted its padded seat.

  Dialwatcher’s slight frame perched jaggedly on its edge, hardly impressing the supple leather. He looked uncomfortable and stared at the floor.

  Melkin suspected Dialwatcher was diverting a need to let flow some much bottled-up anger, against which only deference served as an adequate restraint.

  Was it age that seemed to be mellowing his own views, Melkin thought, that seemed to have displaced singular, obsessive and clear sight with a foreign fog of indecision? Melkin couldn’t think straight enough to find an answer, and so just gave his own anxiety free rein. “All was brought to its lowest order you know, Dialwatcher, throughout Baradcar. I assure you.”

  One of the marks on Dialwatcher’s cheek appeared to flick, almost as though it were alive. Despite not being close, Melkin could clearly see the same colouration, the same crazy-paving of veins, swimming in Dialwatcher’s eyes, making Melkin’s jaw drop.

  “Then we know at least two things with certainty, my dear,” Lambsplitter offered Melkin, failing to draw his eyes but at least gathering up his mouth.

  “Two things?”

  “Yes. Firstly, that some of Leiyatel still survives, but,” and here she set her mouth hard, “but there’s only one person now alive who can recover it.”

  Melkin at last found his gaze released, but it only sought the window, and through it the wooded rise up Yuhlm’s bounding basin. Beyond it and out of sight lay Galgaverre, beside which was Lord Nephril’s likely final resting place.

  3 Where Snakes Bear Omens

  By the time the sun bathed Nephril’s face, the spill had been cleared, glass carefully swept from the floor and picked clear of the rug’s close weave. Only the water stain on the rug left any testament, although that was nearly dry. Somehow, the window now looked too stark, its sharp granite edge hardly softened by the worn wood of the window frame, leaving the flower’s unexpected absence all too evident.

  For the moment, Nephril was unusually free of his nagging pain, making him loath to move. “Where are all the birds these days?” he eventually asked himself. Although the thought hadn’t stirred him, it had certainly brought its own kind of pain, duller and less acute but still disturbing.

  Many a time he’d lain as now, before the open window - lain still, silent and enchanted - as sparrows hopped to and fro along its sill, even flitting to the chest beside it. Many a time, but times now long since passed.

  Without warning, the door opened and Penolith swept silently in. Not only pain now but increasing deafness! How hateful was this growing old, not just old but ancient. At least his sight kept its allegiance, continued to serve him faithfully even as his need diminished.

  “Would you like a nice cup of tea, dear?” Penolith was asking, but to Nephril her voice seemed to float in from another world. It was the sharp and sudden worry on her face that finally moved him.

  “Err, yes. Yes, if thou wouldn’t mind. A cup of nettle would be fine. A little sweetened perhaps. Maybe beet, or ... or honey if we have it.”

  Would that there were still the gluts of honey, once so common but now sadly no more, not these last few years. Few sparrows and almost no bees! Times were indeed beginning to get hard. They couldn’t deny that they’d known it all along.

  Penolith’s gaze lingered just that little bit too long to hide her own pain, a pain of anguish, however, not of corporal suffering. Nephril hated himself for the way he was, the state he’d been brought to by Leiyatel’s slow decline. So slow, so surprisingly slow.

  A burst of distracting activity brought Nephril inadvertently to renew acquaintance with his uncomfortable world as Penolith eased his head up so she could add more pillows. Before he knew it she was gone although he caught a glimpse as she left of tears glistening at the very edge of her eyes.

  When she soon bustled into the kitchen, it was to find Cresmol bent over the sink, fishing for something in the drain hole.

  “Ah, my Lady Guardian, Master Laytner wishes to speak with you.”

  Cresmol lifted something away from the sink, something held between his finger and thumb, something small and glistening. “Shall I tell him you can speak with him now?”

  The wayward sliver of glass was soon dropped to the midden-box, leaving Cresmol lifting his ginger-browed eyes at Penolith. His voice, though, held no trace of his hair’s recent greying tinge. “If I may say so, my Lady, Laytner sounded a little ... well ... not so much anxious but more...”

  “Yes, Cresmol, I’ll speak with him now, if you would?”

  “Very well, Guardian.” When Cresmol left, he seemed to draw with him all the sound from the room, leaving Penolith unnervingly quietened.

  Thoughts of Pettar came to her, reassuring thoughts, thoughts that reminded her how much she missed her brother. She wished his trading endeavours well of course - his and Breadgrinder’s - somewhere along the distant western reaches of the Forest of Belforas. T
he thing she missed most, though, was his calming simplicity.

  Laytner, on the other hand, was more complex, not so much devious but played his cards close to his chest. He may have once nearly been sent down from the college but his saving grace had been his skill in the old language. He’d since proven his worth - the apple of his ancient tutor Crowbeater’s doleful eye.

  Presently, a raised voice - Cresmol’s certainly - shattered her encroaching black thoughts and made her glance warily towards the hallway. His voice came again but softer this time, in halting discussion with a silent party.

  The clatter of something hard and blunt marked regular time until the door reopened and Cresmol came in. “My Lady? You can speak with Master Laytner now.”

  Being on the western side of the villa, the hallway was dark despite its pastel-painted walls. Heavily laden coat hooks ran along one of its longest sides, all manner of outdoor attire patiently awaiting their use; capes and coats, jackets and shawls, an odd cap or two, and maybe a bonnet, long misshapen by innumerable drenchings. They filled the hallway’s still air with a musty smell of wet winter hedgerows although none such lay thereabouts.

  The facing wall held a long, dark open cabinet, its voracious appetite for light quenching its detail. It seemed largely to boast the spines of ancient books although loose papers, dusty boxes and a walking stick or two did much to obscure them.

  Penolith made her way to the far end, to where the cabinet sank into the darkness formed by the contrast of the heavy wood against small, bright panes of frosted glass. These bordered the villa’s solid, old front door. She reached her hand towards an even darker shape in that corner, darker yet seeming to glow with a miasma of fireflies.

  Her hand guided her ear, bringing her head to a stoop. She swallowed once or twice and licked her lips.