Last True World (Dica Series Book 3) Read online

  “LAYTNER? MASTER LAYTNER?” she bellowed into the darkened corner, then cocked her head as her gaze followed her words. “I can hear nothing, Master Cresmol!” she bemoaned, tetchily. “Not a thing, not even the snakes.”

  Cresmol carefully squeezed past her, put his own ear to the open end of the pipe she’d only just vacated and tutted, loudly. He stood back a pace, Penolith following suit, as he grasped a handle and began to turn it in a large circle.

  There was a soft, scraping sound, as though amber were being dragged stubbornly around an expanse of felt, the cloth’s dense fibres straining hard to stand on end. Cresmol remained more obdurate than the felt and kept at his labour until the miasma about the box fair glowed. A mass of what looked like bright dandelion-seed umbrellas quickly burned away in their eager escape.

  Maybe Cresmol had been a little too exuberant for the box now sounded like umpteen fingernails being clicked, their tuneless noise filling the dark corner. Even as Penolith placed her hand back on the pipe, to steady her ear against it, she felt the small hairs on the back of her hand stand on end.

  “Master Laytner? Can you hear me now?” She listened, intently.

  The tube sounded as though it contained a whole nest of vipers for it hissed loudly, in slow, sinuous waves, and onto which a man’s thin and cracked voice was laid. “Guardian Penolith? Is that you, my Lady?”

  “Preserve Dica! Thank the Certain Power, I can hear you at last.”

  “Good, I’m glad of it. Are ... are you and Lord Nephril keeping well?”

  “We are ... as best as can be expected. And yourself?”

  “Yes, Lady Guardian. Fine, thank you.”

  Just a hesitant pause by the Guardian before she asked, “Is something wrong?”

  Laytner’s own small pause spoke much. “Oh, no, nothing much, Guardian. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just that you don’t normally refer to Nephril by his title.”

  “Ah, well. I would like to see him fairly soon if that would be alright. I mean, I don’t...”

  “That would be fine, Master Laytner. As you know, Nephril doesn’t exactly have a full diary these days.”

  “No, of course not. It’s just that I could do with speaking with him soon, quite soon.”

  There was always a fear that followed Penolith around, one that clung to the hem of her gowns, that grasped at her collar or cuff, anything to stay close. It centred around time.

  “How soon?”

  “Would today be too short a notice?”

  “Today!”

  “If it’s not convenient I can always...”

  “No, Laytner, no. Today’s as good as any. You wouldn’t be putting us out. Why ... why the ... why the urgency?”

  “Very good, Guardian. I’ll see you before noon then. Must rush. Things to do before I leave. See you shortly.”

  The snakes returned, venomously close. The dandelion-seed umbrellas, though, continued to jerk and glow, briefly and less intensely now, as though tired at last of cavorting, hesitant of a final, short and scintillating end. They seemed to Penolith as though they’d finally grasped the true weight of the message they’d only just helped carry.

  4 For Want of No Man but One

  At least the clock remained ponderous. Ancient, disdainful and proudly upright, it marked its slow, striding time towards noon with a hollow lilt. Melkin felt it spoke confidentially, as though close to his ear, its measured words and metronomic sentences enunciated with great care after even greater thought. It was reassuring, more so by far than the incessant chatter of the stoom engine - the accursed thing.

  At least where he and Lady Lambsplitter now were was somewhat removed from its more direct annoyance. It was really only the vibration that crept into their dining room through the old timbers of the mill’s fabric.

  Small metal objects would sometimes break into song, like mechanical canaries, before some shift in the mill’s demand would alter the stoom engine’s labour and thereby bring respite.

  Currently, it was one of Melkin’s spoons - patient in the promise of pudding - that hummed in sympathy, that rocked ever so slightly against the bleached white boards of the table. It was the insistence that always annoyed Melkin.

  Whenever it happened, which was all too often, the erratic rattle or whining wander of cutlery or china would draw his eye. It would make him watch as unseen hands pushed the offending item against its neighbour, or occasionally onto the floor.

  The note was far too high, the note the spoon now jarred in duet-delirium with the fork, too high to allow considered thought. It put Melkin at a disadvantage it seemed, against his Lady’s arguments.

  “You’re going to have to enlist him, Melkin ... my dear. You do know that don’t you?”

  If it wasn’t for the close need the college had of him, Melkin would have moved out of the mill that housed it. He’d have found lodgings for them close by, but not too close as to have his own imaginary waterwheel’s presence marred by any real stoom engines. Maybe then he could have marshalled his thoughts better.

  “You know there’s no chance of that, my dear Lamb’. Nephril will never shift his position.”

  “He’ll have to be made to see.”

  “Made? And how do you propose we do that? How do we make Lord Nephril put aside the surety the Aoide dar Tegan has given him all these years? Speaking of which, even now I’m still not convinced we’re doing the right thing, I mean, if...”

  Lady Lambsplitter’s eyes became steely, a look Melkin was lately beginning to recognise more often. “Why don’t you set Laytner to task at it, hmm? I’m sure, with a little careful guidance, he could winkle out a completely different meaning, something to undermine Nephril’s dogma.”

  “He’s not stupid. It would take a great deal more cunning than Bazarral possesses.”

  “He’s old now, Melkin, not just old but ancient beyond reason. From what Penolith lets slip he’s just about away with the faeries these days.”

  Lambsplitter stopped when she saw disgust surfacing in Melkin’s eyes. She looked away, down at her meal and absently pushed a boiled potato about her plate. “Just look at this chicken. “Remember how plump they used to be?”

  She looked up at him. “If you don’t do something soon, this,” she prodded the scrawny roast leg of her midday meal, “will symbolise the very end of your life’s work ... the end of a new Bazarran Dica. Is that what you want?”

  “No, but...”

  “But nothing, Steward Melkin!” Her use of the resurrected title stung, reminded him how he’d assumed the position purely for a purpose.

  “You’re making good progress,” she continued, “bringing your people to a new dawn, giving them back what was naturally theirs, but you run the risk of losing it all. If you don’t delay the inevitable, don’t give your people breathing-space, then they’ll turn against you as surely as day follows night.”

  “He may be away with the faeries now, Lamb’, but Nephril carries centuries of wisdom. I still can’t help thinking he must be right, that we’d be foolhardy bringing another Certain Power into Dica, another Leiyatel to Baradcar.”

  “But you’ve no other choice, Melkin my dear, none at all! Believe me. Not even your stout and sturdy Bazarran are adapting fast enough, never mind the old tribes of Esna. The land is failing them far faster than their wit can grow.”

  Lady Lambsplitter was right of course, quite right. As Leiyatel approached her death, the benefits she’d long bestowed upon the Realm of Dica were dying with her, and in their passing leaving the long-pampered Dicans adrift. Where produce had grown to perfection with little husbandry, it now wilted in the ground or vanished to the mouths of pests, or just simply never appeared in the first place.

  They had all been confident of relearning the old ways in time, of rediscovering the ancient knowledge to ensure sufficient from a land fast returning to a much lower, more natural fecundity. Perhaps they’d just been too naïve.

  They’d certainly never imagined jus
t how hard survival could be. Maybe she was right, Melkin thought, after all she usually was. Maybe their only chance really was to replace what Nephril had so clearly shown to be a most insidious monster.

  5 She Will Sup at Her Own Breast

  From her bedroom window, Penolith could look out across the villa’s neat grounds and gardens towards Galgaverre’s long, low, leaden and unobtrusive northern wall. Its featureless march turned not far away - at the junction of Nordgang Road and Weyswal Way - and ran alongside Bazarral’s eastern boundary, south down the Weyswal towards Galgaverre’s distant gate.

  The junction itself lay at the very edge of the Esnadales, at Eyesget, where Nephril and Penolith’s villa stood apart in relative isolation. From this empty corner of the city, the rolling rise of the dales lifted northwards whereas Nordgang Road ran to the west as Bazarral’s northern boundary. They both led away from the ancient plain upon which Galgaverre had long stood.

  It was an odd name, Penolith thought, for she’d never known of a gate here, unlike Weysget at the other end of Nordgang Road, with its splendidly ornate archway. Perhaps she’d missed some subtlety of the old language. Maybe get had originally meant little more than a common way into a city. Maybe she would remember to ask Laytner when he arrived.

  Eyesget had certainly never held enough importance for that kind of ornately embellished gate, nor such defensive rebuff. It had long been deserted, its properties sad and faded and deathly quiet. An ideal place in fact for Nephril to while away his final years.

  There he was now, in the rose garden below, well wrapped against the afternoon’s cool but briefly sun-kissed air. Penolith wondered if he was asleep for he seemed not to move, his back to her obscuring where his eyes may have found.

  She imagined he was soaking in the crimson joy of the blooms now spread in an arc before him. The very bed from where that single flower had come, the one that had fallen to the floor this morning.

  For all Penolith knew, Nephril may already have passed into a soothingly eternal rest, no need now for his own carr sceld. That had been his own hope after all, as Penolith well knew, a hope at last to bear fruit as Leiyatel drew near her end.

  It had been hard for her to watch her treasured Nephril slowly sink towards oblivion, a passing he’d thought impossible for more than two thousand years. She also knew he suffered it, suffered the pain of a decaying body only held whole by his weft and weave of Leiyatel.

  Cresmol appeared, carrying a chair across the lawn, making a cautious bee-line for Nephril. He placed it carefully beside Nephril’s own before unobtrusively withdrawing.

  It was certainly a summer’s day, a bumble bee noisily meandering across the garden, darting around Nephril before becoming lost to the elder beyond the garden wall. Not a honey bee, though, nor were there sparrows to flit about Nephril’s feet.

  Master Laytner appeared, retracing Cresmol’s steps, following the faint, silvered path his feet had made in the grass. He too approached Nephril’s side but lowered himself carefully into the vacant chair.

  Laytner leant forward a touch, to seek out Nephril’s eyes, but found them closed.

  Despite it being uncharacteristically cool, he found it most pleasant in the shelter of the garden. The breeze that had snatched his papers as he’d walked from his stoom carriage to the villa here held back from its pranks and brought only the pleasure of fragrant air.

  The bumble bee returned, meandering still.

  The grass at Laytner’s feet was a little long, darkening the suede of his boots with the persisting damp of the morning’s rain. He knew it would stain and look a right mess. His own fault!

  Just look at that patch of blue sky, he thought as he tilted his head back to follow the wavering flight of a brown and black butterfly. “Butorfleoge,” he said aloud, rolling the syllables around in his mouth as the insect fluttered over his head.

  He tipped his chair further back. “But-or-fle-o-ge,” and stared directly at Guardian Penolith’s upside-down face, framed in her bedroom window.

  Even at a distance, he could see new lines etched there, the scripted evidence of her care for Nephril. Laytner closed his mouth and tried to smile, the angle of his head and the stretch of his neck making it more a grimace.

  “Common Fritillary, once known as Dice-Box,” Lord Nephril said, drawing Laytner’s head forward with a painful snap, his grimace now a foolish grin. “The butterfly?” Nephril raised an eyebrow. “Common but no longer numerous.”

  It was only when Nephril let a wry smile ease aside the creases around his mouth that Laytner realised. “Oh, ah, yes. The butterfly, my Lord, of course.” He glanced back the way of the Fritillary, the bedroom window now empty. Without having noticed, his stack of papers had slipped from his lap to the lawn, now suffering the same fate as the suede of his boots.

  “Why the urgency, Master Laytner? What hath thou found to stir thine imagination so?”

  Laytner didn’t immediately follow Nephril’s gist, but remembered his Lordship’s vast wisdom of age and so came straight to the point. “You remember that time when we talked about your weft and weave, Nephril?” Nephril only stared into Laytner’s eyes. “You recall? When you explained its connection with Leiyatel.”

  Nephril didn’t recall, thought it odd he should have discussed it at all.

  “You told me... I’m sure you mentioned it, my Lord.”

  “Nephril, young Laytner, if thou wouldst. I still prefer mine name alone.”

  “I’m sorry, my ... err ... Nephril, but you did tell me, you know, how you came by your longevity. You must remember?”

  “Maybe I did. What of it?”

  “Well, you said you were waiting on your release from Leiyatel.”

  The previous night’s dream came back to Nephril - fleetingly, fragmented and distant - but soon clear enough to be real. “Dost thou reckon that more than the one world can be?”

  Laytner’s mouth gaped.

  “Never mind. What of it then? Of mine assign to Leiyatel’s largesse?”

  Laytner riffled through his now soggy papers, once more in his lap. “I found this, Nephril,” and passed Nephril a single sheet.

  The words were undisturbed by the lawn’s dampening; bold, black, but very small. Nephril passed it back. “I have difficulty keeping mine eyes still on such small text, Laytner, and mine skill in the old tongue has again withered, mainly through disuse. Tell me what it says.”

  Laytner began reciting, but Nephril coughed. “Nay, young fellow, ‘tis wise counsel to summarise for the ancient, their hold on argument being tenuous at best.”

  “Ah. Right. Err, well ... summary, eh?” The butterfly returned, darting like a wind-blown scrap of paper. “This,” Laytner said, limply shaking the drying sheet, “is a Temporal Profile of the Certain Power’s structure, of the Living Green Stone Tree to give it its lay-term.”

  Nephril’s look of growing exasperation urged Laytner on. “Well! Under the conditions brought about by Dica’s unchecked growth...” That look was still on Nephril’s face. “Well, it seems that the Certain Power’s steady decline is amply supported by the treowlicas expounded in this paper, and ... well, suffice it to say that Leiyatel’s decline is exactly as would be expected.”

  Nephril was about to speak when Laytner added, “Except right at the end, Nephril, or to be more precise, where the end should be.”

  This time Nephril remained silent.

  “It clearly states,” and now Laytner waved the hardening sheet, “that Leiyatel will reach a point where she’s able to sustain herself indefinitely, a point beyond which she becomes immune to all external influence.”

  By now Nephril’s paper-thin lids were crinkled vanishingly high, leaving large, milky-white eyes pooled in his face, their pupils soon narrowing to pinpricks of alarm.

  6 From Whence Their Ships Came In

  Even for a lifelong and natural mariner as Sconner, the voyage had proven disastrous. It had boded so much promise at their embarkation. Not only had Yuhlm College
provided the navigational instruments but also a whole host of charts and commentaries - most it had turned out fairly wide of the mark.

  It had been a volume Lord Nephril had shown Sconner a number of years earlier that had started it all. The Legend of the Living Green Stone Tree had set its own seed in Steermaster Sconner’s mind. When he eventually added Retired as a suffix to his name, the unaccustomed excess of time had soon added its own germinating moisture.

  How could so few simple words - from whence their ships came in - have set in motion so much suffering? The night’s stars, crowding above the prow of their barquentine, seemed to laugh down at Sconner, to belittle his pain as their light slid from the gloss of his grey ponytail.

  Apart from the first night after leaving Bazarral’s harbour, during which the heavens had opened, all other nights had remained unnaturally clear. It meant that fixing their latitude had therefore been an easy matter, the North Star so willingly filling the instrument’s sights.

  So much pain borne only of a verse, Sconner couldn’t help but lament, and in that verse’s wake, unnecessary deaths. What but the power of poetry builds so strongly of dreams and hopes in the hardest of hearts?

  Within the plains and dales of Lower Esna, within the lands twixt Eyes and Suswin, and Dacc of Esna, and upon the Foundling Bay, from whence their ships came in, the Bazarran did plough and till rich fields therein, did herd and shepherd stout stock from thin, did foster thereabouts in power, both homely cot and lowly bower.

  It hadn’t been so much the romantic idea of those ancient Bazarran first making their landfall on Foundling Bay’s shores but the image conjured of the strange lands from whence they’d come. The verse, though, had added its own further cruel lure; whilst haven’s passage allegiance kept, unto kin ‘til time o’er time had leapt.

  Haven’s passage! The very passage he and his crew of twenty had now made, a passage not ploughed for thousands of years.