The Silver Vortex

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Wardyke’s shadowUrak caused the drum to be sounded deep into the night, her bony hands moving too fast for human sight as she beat the taut hide hour after hour in the oppressive and listening darkness.

The voice of the drum and the voice of its echo mingled and blurred, rumbling and growling until the sky answered. Only then did Urak lift her hands and give the high, thin call that would give the drum rest. When the lightning came it picked out her figure on the top of the mountain, arms wide and high, head tilted to the sky, counting with her heartbeats the pacing of the thunderclaps. Nearer the storm came, and nearer — until the thunder struck at the same time as the lightning.

‘Bring me a worthy acolyte...’ was the message the rising wind scattered among the mountains, hissed through the branches of the trees, hurled through the narrow ravines.

‘Give me a name... a face... someone to call... someone to teach... someone to carry on my work...’

The long cloak she wore flapped around her and cast giant shadows across the valley. For a moment it looked as though she would lift off and beat her wings into the storm.

‘I have been tormented by fools...’ she howled. ‘Send me someone who will learn quickly... who will understand...’

She was an old woman, her skin a mass of folds. The hair that swirled around her was as white as smoke, never cut since the moment of her birth. She had sent away a score of apprentices in her long life, never satisfied, never ready to share her deepest secrets with anyone she did not consider her equal. But who could ever equal her, mighty witch-woman of the mountains, seasoned sorceress of nearly a hundred summers? Lately she had felt time slipping away from her: she could hear death whispering behind her, and she knew she had trained no one fully to follow her.

She tried to hold the rain back for she knew that once the rain burst from the black cloud that pressed so heavily down on the brow of her mountain, the storm-power she needed to use would be defused. With her own will she forced the cloud to hold its burden.

Once again her voice rang out.

Once again the wind carried her message.

In the livid light before the next whip-crack of thunder, she thought she glimpsed another figure on the rock platform beside her.

Her thin body was shaking with the strain of calling the storm and holding it poised. There was almost unbearable pain in every limb — but she knew she must hold on.

The next flash confirmed that she was no longer alone.

A man was before her — his eyes, the eyes of the dead.

She closed her own eyes and saw him still, held as an afterimage, accurate in every detail.

‘Your name?’ she asked in the language of the dead.

‘Wardyke,’ he said, his voice crackling like dry kindling in fire. Wardyke! She knew the name from a time when he had been her apprentice... one who had pleased her more than most.

‘Wardyke,’ she hissed, and felt the first hard hammer-blow of the rain. ‘Give me a name! Give me someone worthy to train as my heir, someone who will succeed in destroying the Temple of the Sun where I have failed, someone who will make Guiron wish he had never been conceived in the womb of Time — let alone born to cross my path in this life...’

Wardyke smiled darkly. He too had been the victim of Guiron’s power as High Priest of the Temple of the Sun. It was Guiron who had refused him the final prestigious mark of initiation into the priesthood after his long and arduous training at the Temple. It was Guiron who had masterminded the forces that had defeated him on the field of battle. And before that — in another lifetime — there had been another wrong not yet paid for... Wardyke had a great deal of bitterness to share with this wild and fearsome woman of the mountains.

He smiled because he knew a way to avenge both Urak and himself that was so neat, so economical, so marvellously simple and cruel, that she could not help but be delighted with it. He would give her a name that rang in the heart of both Guiron and Kyra, his two most hated enemies. He would give her an heir that no one would suspect until it was too late: an heir that would destroy the Temple from within. Urak would not regret calling his shadow up from those dark regions in which it had lain festering for so long. She would be proud of her one-time pupil. She and he would achieve together what neither of them had been able to achieve alone.

‘Deva,’ he said, his eyes darker than a cavern that had never seen the light. ‘Deva, daughter of Kyra.’

Urak did not know the name Deva. She did not know the name Kyra. Her quarrel had been with Guiron and, before him, with other High Priests of the Temple of the Sun who had tried to prevent the spread of her power.

‘Who is this Deva?’ she called. ‘Who is this Kyra?’ But the pressure of the cloud above her was now too strong for her to hold back and she could feel her will giving way, her body crumpling. The image of Wardyke was fading, the echo of his words diminishing until finally it was drowned out by the thunderous beat of the raindrops on the rock as the cloud burst. On her knees in the deluge she still tried to reach him, tried to learn more about the name he had given her... but all she could hear now was the clamour of a million tiny chattering rain voices warning her that she might pay dearly for the name she had been given, that she should not accept it lightly...

* * * *

The slave who served Urak, Boggoron, found her in the morning, soaked through and shivering, gibbering a name he did not know. He carried her to her cave and saw that the hearth fire was banked up. The storm had passed and the mountains rang with the sound of water on rock, birds greeting the sunshine, a shepherd calling his sheep.

* * * *

The same dawn saw Deva, daughter of Kyra, many days’ journey to the east of Urak’s mountain fastness, stirring and waking beside her husband Gya. A thin beam of sunlight driving through a small gap in the curtain pricked her eyelids like a needle. She tossed her head impatiently and turned over, her back to the window. But the damage had been done. She was awake and the birds, uttering every variety of trill and pipe and warble, insisted that the day was already under way and she was missing it.

She turned back again to the young man still asleep beside her and pulled the rug aside so that she could see the firm and muscular landscape of his back. She kissed the nape of his neck and then worked her way down his arm, pausing to give his elbow a sharp bite. He woke with a jerk and slapped at the place she had bitten. She laughed and bit him on the hip. He heaved over on his back and took her roughly in his arms, shaking her and then kissing her. But now that he was awake and she had him roused, she suddenly lost interest and pulled away, slipping from the bed and taunting him by standing naked just out of his reach. She felt restless, as though she wanted something, but she didn’t know what. A short while ago it would have been Gya. Then she could not have enough of his loving. But now... She reached for her wrap and covered herself.

He stared at her intently for a few moments, and then turned his shoulder to her, his fists clenched. He knew her well enough not to insist on anything when she had that expression on her face. He was fully awake now, and angry. He was angry with her and angry with himself. He wished he was not bound so close to her: wished that he could live without her. He told himself a thousand times that he had not chosen her — she had chosen him. He had walked into this community, its wood and reed houses clustered in the valley of Haylken near the Temple of the Sun, a free bowman, the hero who had helped to overthrow the armies of Groth, honoured, admired, in a position to take any woman he wanted. He could see them now, the young girls, clustering around him, their eyes begging for the slightest crumb of his attention. But Deva had swept them all aside. With a flash of her jet-dark eyes and a swing of her long raven’s-wing hair she had led him firmly from the others and set him beside herself at the victory feast. He had been astonished at her beauty and her boldness, and awed by the splendour of her dress, the great clasp of amber and gold that held her light cloak to her creamy-white shoulder, the gold bracelets that gleamed on her slender arms. He remembered, as a drowning man remembers the last glimpse of dry land as he sinks beneath the surface of the water, the comfortable and rounded contours of Farla, a less frightening beauty, on the other side of the long table, before he succumbed completely to the spell of Deva, daughter of the High Priest Khu-ren and his wife Kyra, mighty Lords of the Sun, the most powerful and respected people in the land.

Deva was getting dressed. He could hear her moving about the room. What would she do so early in the morning? Today was probably market day. She would be out before anyone else, making sure she had first choice of all the goods the merchants brought in, all the food the farmers stacked in such neat piles. She needn’t have bothered — for everyone knew her and everyone loved her and she would be given the first chance to acquire anything worth having that came into the Haylken community this day. Sometimes he called her a magpie. She seemed to need to accumulate things. He had seen her so often, flushed and bright-eyed, bargaining for some length of cloth or basket of willow wands that he knew she didn’t need. Crowds would gather round her, enjoying the heated exchange between the young woman and the salty old merchant, egging her on as she lowered the value of the goods for barter. And then, when she had him cornered, she would suddenly lose interest and move on to the next one. He would have thought the merchants would hate her for the way she teased them, but they did not — and nor did he. They, like him, probably remembered the times when she gave in suddenly, capriciously, beautifully.

She leant down and kissed the top of his head just before she left the room and he heard her humming as she stepped lightly out into the early morning sunlight. ‘Next time,’ he thought, ‘next time I won’t let her get away with it.’ He drifted back to sleep, pleasantly imagining how he would make love to her the next time she woke him as she had this morning.

* * * *

Isar awoke troubled. For the first time in many years he had dreamed about his father — not Karne, who had brought him up with loving care, but his natural father, Wardyke, who had raped his mother Fern, and who had been killed in the war between the Spear-lords.

As soon as he opened his eyes the dream began to slip away, as an intruder would when the master of the house begins to stir. Isar lay on his back staring at the wooden beams above him and the thatch that kept the weather out. The grey light of early dawn had entered through the window he kept unshuttered in all but the worst weather. Lark, who lay beside him still wrapped in sleep, hated the dark and was comforted to see the stars from their bed. She was usually awake with the dawn like her namesake, but this day she lay curled up with her hand over her eyes as though she didn’t want to face the day.

Isar tried to remember what he had dreamed. The impression of Wardyke’s presence was strong, but he could recall none of the details. He wished Lark was awake. He felt the need to talk about Wardyke. Strange after all these years! He thought he had put him out of his life forever. He kissed the shoulders of his wife and held her close. She stirred and turned to him with a sleepy smile. Lark, the girl who had saved his life more than once during that dreadful conflict with Groth and his followers, her tongue cut out on Na-Groth’s orders, a stranger to the Haylken community, was yet as close to him now as his own heartbeat.