The Learning - David Guymer Read online

  ‘I-I will try.’

  The old embailor appeared to consider Ubraich a moment, then thrust his pain-stave into his ribs. A firm blow from such a weapon could cripple a leviadon. The idoneth, trained by abnegation and privation, had an altogether more delicate nervous system. Even a touch could be lethal. It was like being burned alive. Being shocked repeatedly by fangmora. Being eaten alive by sawfish while he screamed. It was all of those things and yet, at the same time, none. It was purely internal. It was pain of a sort that would chew through a body to inflict every suffering imaginable short of actual death.

  It was pain that an aelf would say or do anything to avoid experiencing twice.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Giléan asked calmly.

  ‘Confound its mind,’ Ubraich gasped.

  Ignoring his apprentice, Giléan kicked off after Sithilien and the gulchmare.

  Ubraich carefully unfolded his body from the foetal position it had unconsciously curled itself into. He tentatively quested out with his beast magic. The gulchmare’s soul was a writhing knot of angry defiance, an apex monster that an aelf, in his arrogance, had put in a cage. Ubraich touched its mind at the same moment that Giléan’s pain-stave cracked into its shoulder. Its soul halo turned ugly. The beast emitted a shriek of agony. Its mind folded in on itself, instinctively seeking an escape from the pain. It felt the link to Ubraich’s soul, and like a school of fish bursting from the closing jaws of an allopex it attacked.

  Ubraich grunted. The muscles of his face tightened as he struggled to hold the gulchmare’s tortured soul at bay. With the fin-claws and teeth of its mind it savaged him, real wounds opening up his chest and his forearms, while leaving his journeymen leathers undamaged. He screamed as a lash of the beast’s tail tore the meat of his thigh. Blood ripped outwards from his leg in a narrow jet.

  ‘Hold it,’ Giléan snarled, and struck it another blow.

  The gulchmare’s torment was staggering. For a moment it was as if Ubraich’s mind and the beast’s fell into each other’s embrace, too beaten and wearied to fight any further. It was so far removed from the principles of eolas that Ubraich almost fainted from the dissonance of it. This was not how it was supposed to be.

  What would the cythai have made of the embailor’s art, he wondered?

  Or the asur?

  He shrieked as a soul maddened by agonies beyond all comprehension savaged at his. Had the gulchmare been lucid enough to actively desire him harm, then it might have slain him on the spot. A mauling proved adequate to appease its rage, and he was flung physically back through a compressed fog of dark blood and tiny bubbles. His body cracked against the ishratisar panelling of the corral wall.

  The gulchmare’s mind landed firmly back into its own body. It was furious, and free to act on it. It snapped Giléan up in its jaws and shook the master embailor violently back and forth. He lost his pain-stave. ‘You belong to me!’ Sithilien yelled. She attacked the gulchmare’s head this time with the bladed end of her voltspear, but its armour encrustations spoiled each of her blows.

  Truly, it was a mount deserving of Túrach’s asglir’akhelion.

  Ubraich pushed himself from the corral wall with a whimper. His body trembled with unpleasant sensations. It was the most intensely he had felt since his mother had left him at the gates of the túrscoll. He made the connection unthinkingly. There was no longer any pain attached to that memory. It had been crushed by time and desolation. Just the idea of feeling made his body respond as though threatened by unseen predators.

  He looked at Giléan, flailing in a murky red compress of his own blood.

  He looked at the beast.

  Something arrogant and prideful awoke in his soul-memory. He would break the beast where Giléan had failed. It would be his name that future generations of isharann would learn alongside Lotann and Mor’u when they studied the masters of ages past. He extended his beast magic towards the gulchmare once more. The master embailor was already the centre of its attentions, the taste of his lifeblood filling its mouth. Through the connection that Ubraich had already formed between their minds it was simplicity itself to bid the predator to sink its every thought into the devouring of his former master.

  ‘Do not let go, Lady Sithilien.’

  Kicking off from the wall of the corral, he swam at the distracted gulchmare. Sithilien had her thighs clamped around the beast’s flanks, holding on to the mineral encrustations of its neck with one hand while continuing to stab at its neck with the other. Ubraich came up beneath it and drew back his pain-stave.

  The blow crunched into the rock armour of its hip. The beast’s back arched, pain shredding outwards and coursing up the monster’s spine to its brain. Sithilien whooped as the creature’s convulsions exposed bare skin at the base of its throat, and she drove her voltspear into it. Blood squirted from the wound. Its soul flared with confusion and pain. Ubraich reversed his grip on his pain-stave, striking the gulchmare two-handed across its hindquarters. It released Giléan’s carcass from its jaws, a thin scream of tiny bubbles issuing from its mouth.

  Ubraich planted his foot against the monster’s flank and pushed himself back.

  ‘Command it,’ he hissed. ‘Assert your soul’s dominance over its.’

  ‘Yield!’ Sithilien crowed, hooking her arm under the beast’s throat as if to throttle it into submission.

  The gulchmare snapped its jaws in a futile bid to dislodge the akhelion straddling the back of its neck. Its gouged eyes found Ubraich. Its nostrils flared, the muscles in its neck tensing. Ubraich had been inside the monster’s mind. He knew what instincts drove it.

  ‘She said yield.’

  He held his hand to the gulchmare’s gaping jaws, and the beast recoiled as though from a master’s pain-stave. Baring his teeth in effort, he bent his will against the last shred of the monster’s defiance, his magic a tool to leverage its pain. Where he found rebelliousness, Ubraich expunged it mercilessly, excruciating entire swathes of the creature’s mind to leave dead soul wherever free will might bloom.

  Slowly, reluctantly, the gulchmare closed its jaws.

  Sithilien sank as the tension left its spine.

  She began to laugh.

  ‘Yes, Ubraich. Yes!’

  Ubraich glowed with the first words of praise he had ever received.

  He found he liked it.

  Two

  I

  Ubraich sat back into the rippling flesh of the giant calroir clam, gently kneading the muscle of his thigh. His expression was rueful. It had been twenty years since his encounter with the gulchmare, yet the wounds he had taken that day had never closed. It was a soul injury, according to the tru’heas, and such wounds seldom healed well; they had been known to pass from parent to child, and even to recur in distant generations. The constant and quite obvious pain it caused had made him something of a pariah, for the idoneth found extremes of any kind disturbing. This had not troubled Ubraich unduly. Something in the idoneth’s nature bade them to seek out seclusion, and none more so than those drawn to the embailor’s arts. He settled into his bound-beast’s gently quivering gill-sac, allowing its simplistic soul to form a protective mesh about his own as he toyed idly with the necklace of eight deepmare eyes resting against his chest.

  In the corral below, three young isharann took turns to bait an allopex, notionally working in tandem to bring the beast down, but idoneth did not work naturally in groups. As he listened, Irimé, the eldest, broke from the others to lay a blow. Her pain-stave crunched into the allopex’s shoulder, convulsing it.

  ‘A well-struck blow, Irimé,’ Ubraich called down.

  He had been experimenting with praise and found it to be effective. As with anything, it was best indulged in moderation.

  Irimé was a vigorous girl, when passion was allowed her, and so she relished these opportunities in the corral. The study of beast magic and of
the ishratisar’s illuminated bestiaries bored her. Ubraich had been forced to face down the angry young isharann more than once. There were those in the túrscoll who would tut, as much at her intensity as his unspoken indulgence of it. ‘Send her to the azydrazor to learn the ways of the soulrender,’ they often said. For their ways were not dissimilar and the soulscryers who assigned young children to their respective fanes were not immune to mistakes. Where the embailor strove to bend a soul to his will, the akhelion-schooled soulrender tore it wholesale from a being’s flesh. But Ubraich did not wish for that. He knew that, once unleashed, the difficulty lay in restraining her.

  ‘Back now, Irimé. I would see what the others can do.’

  With a scowl, she withdrew.

  Flowain and Valhanir were of a similar age and as close as twins. Both were more naturally cautious, and though they lacked Irimé’s talent, they also lacked her scars. Flowain, in particular, would still let fear show when paired with a particularly difficult beast, and had probably felt Ubraich’s wrath as often as Irimé. In that, at least, the two were evenly matched. She had a gift, however, and Ubraich was loath to be rid of her entirely. He had once watched her floating on her back in the tru’heas herb gardens, arms extended to the wild ocean, singing down a flock of spinelbuds. They had come to her through the arbour nets of the túrscoll, mindless of the predators they held, to enamel her waiting hands in ruby-coloured florets. Her laugh had been as carefree as a cythai queen.

  Ubraich had taken no pleasure in punishing her for her sense of wonder.

  All three would make fine embailors, for he demanded no less.

  The allopex reared suddenly to snap at Valhanir. The monster’s jaw was bound in rubbery kelp, preventing it from opening its mouth much more than an arm’s width, but the boy startled all the same. He cried out as he stumbled back. The allopex surged, butting its flat nose into the young isharann’s stomach. Valhanir dropped his pain-stave. Ubraich frowned in displeasure. Before he could offer a chastisement, Irimé pounced. She leapt at the allopex from behind, beating its back and tail with such a flurry of blows that the monster almost broke its own spine with its convulsions.

  ‘Enough, Irimé!’ The young isharann was snarling as she drew back her pain-stave for another blow. ‘Enough.’

  From across the corral, Flowain cocked her head, then made a gesture with her foot that Ubraich would not have noticed had he not seen it many times before. Mirroring it almost exactly, the allopex swatted Irimé with its tail, crashing her into the walls of the corral.

  Ubraich winced to see the ishratisar soul-pigment of the asglir that had been rendered there crack.

  Only then did his concern shift to his pupil.

  ‘Should I dispatch a namarti for the tru’heas?’

  Paddling furiously, Irimé rolled herself upright. She thrust her pain-stave accusingly at Flowain. The younger embailor noticeably shrank from it. Valhanir looked between them. He was a swift learner. One lesson had been enough to teach him to stay well clear of Irimé’s temper.

  ‘I know that was you, Flowain!’

  Gripping the edges of his calroir shell, Ubraich rose, trying and failing to suppress the quiver of pain that ran through his leg. He settled instead for ignoring it, letting it suffer in isolation from his spirit. The calroir emitted a wheeze to compensate its buoyancy for the shift in weight.

  ‘You earned that blow, Irimé,’ he said.

  ‘But she–’

  ‘Imagine, if you prefer, that the blow was mine. I would have tasked her with delivering it had she not done so freely.’ Irimé snorted at that. ‘I tire of your distemper. You may retire to the seclusion cells until I deem it to have passed.’

  ‘But–’

  Ubraich lifted his pain-stave, and the young isharann quietly set about gathering her things. ‘And you two.’ Ubraich added snap to his voice. ‘Remove this thing.’ he pointed to the quivering allopex with his staff. ‘See that it is fed your rations this eve and its wounds are treated. Tomorrow, I think, it will be ready to break.’

  ‘It is all quite different from Giléan’s regime, is it not?’ Lady Sithilien observed drily as her gulchmare drew in alongside his calroir.

  Princess Sithilien, Ubraich reminded himself.

  Her claiming of the gulchmare had impressed not only the Túrach’s akhelion order, but the royal house of Anaer as well, and they had quickly seen her wed to one of the royal bloodline’s innumerable namarti bastards. She wore a coat of scalloped armour emblazoned with the spiked fist of Anaer arms. Her helm was tall and silver, in the old asglir style, leaving her proud, lined face uncovered. The gulchmare too was cloaked in heraldry and mail. A hundred and forty years old, and she had never looked more powerful. Ubraich seldom kept himself up to date with the whisperings of court, but he knew that Sithilien had recently given birth to her fourteenth child. Another namarti. Nobody was entirely certain as to the identity of the father. Nobody was entirely interested. Least of all her prince. The idoneth were dogged if not enthusiastic breeders: they prized fecundity far more than fidelity.

  His royal patron and occasional lover settled into a companionable silence that Ubraich rebuffed with a frown. He fondled the eight-eyed necklace thoughtfully as the princess spoke again.

  ‘Giléan would have made an example of Irimé for her aggression. He would have punished Flowain for her cowardice, and Valhanir for his ineptitude.’

  ‘I decided long ago that I would surpass Giléan,’ Ubraich said.

  She laughed, and Ubraich noted how it had been hoarsened by her years. ‘Giléan was good enough. His skills earned him the favour of the akhelion.’

  ‘I do not desire their favour.’

  Her smile thinned. ‘There are those who wonder by what right you wear the Eight-Eyes’ necklace.’

  ‘Six-Eyes,’ Ubraich corrected her. ‘His name was Six-Eyes.’

  ‘Not if you heed the aelves at court.’

  ‘There is a reason I do not.’ Fastening his jaw, he settled into his mount’s flesh as if resolving to ignore the akhelion princess. ‘I broke the gulchmare you ride now.’ He glared askance at her and the beast whinnied as if remembering the cut of his mind, forcing Sithilien into an inelegant touch on the reins. His abilities had only grown since that day. ‘Not Giléan.’

  ‘I remember. It is why I am here now. You are proud, Ubraich, and I am old. I would see you continue to enjoy favour when my soul rests in the chorrileum.’

  Ubraich said nothing, choosing instead to watch as Valhanir set nets around the allopex to prepare it for moving.

  ‘Are you not even going to ask?’

  Ubraich frowned up at her.

  Sithilien mirrored the expression. ‘I am recently returned from a raid on the Blight of Gullyrion. On my return, I lost several namarti scouts to a deepmare of a kind whose description confounded the isharann in my phalanx.’

  ‘Tidecasters and soul wardens,’ Ubraich muttered. ‘What would they know of a beast?’

  ‘It was shelled after the fashion of a leviadon, they claimed, though narrower in shape and not quite as large. It moved swiftly too, they said. Whatever it was, it dispatched forty namarti reavers.’

  ‘Where was this?’ Ubraich tore his gaze from his apprentices to regard the princess fully. ‘And when?’

  ‘In the shallow seas, near to Dwy-Hor.’

  ‘The shallows,’ Ubraich mused. ‘It would be rare to find a truly great beast there. Does anybody else know of it?’

  Sithilien unsheathed her grin. ‘For a reclusive people, we are little able to keep a secret amongst ourselves. The túrscoll is abuzz with talk of this beast, as you would know if you spent any time there. Several embailors and their apprentices are already making plans to claim the monster.’

  ‘They will need the support of the akhelion.’ Ubraich’s mind was already moving, plotting, visualising the long overdue ecli
pse of his former master’s legend by his own. ‘Without the strength of the battalions they will never make it as far as Dwy-Hor.’

  Sithilien’s harness creaked as she leaned towards him. The smile on her face was much the same as Giléan would wear, in his unguarded moments, when he had succeeded in imparting some wisdom.

  ‘Know you of an embailor in Túrach who could command such backing?’

  Ubraich scowled. His right hand found its way to his face. With forefinger extended, he started to make rings around his eyes. It was an old habit. He could not recall when he had started doing it, or why, but whenever he felt emotion threatening to get the better of him, it reminded him of a time, a place, where he had felt safe.

  He let his hand float to his side, and sighed.

  ‘How long will you need to get ready?’

  II

  The idoneth were a puritan people, little given to carnival or splendour. If there was an unearthly beauty to their enclaves, then it was because the reef and shell from which they had been created were possessed of it. And if their armed hosts appeared to be things of sublimity, then it was because their composites too had a beauty all of their own. This was as true for the namarti thralls as it was for their akhelion lords, for sickly and withered of soul though they were, they were perfect of body as only aelves could be.

  The namarti battalion of Princess Sithilien assembled before the shell-encrusted tidegate of Túrach, not in the dressed ranks and files of a landed host, but as a school of beautifully scaled fish in a bowl. They swam freely, armed with lanmari greatswords or short whisperbows, confined only by the cohesion of the school itself and by the softly glowing coral spires that jutted above them like the spines of a God-Beast.

  Neither Ubraich nor Sithilien had made any prior announcement, and yet a small crowd had grown organically to witness the hunt’s departure. Namarti carters and pickers and labourers paused in their efforts. Lords and their favoured servants watched from coral shelves and verandas that grew from the great spires. A rawness of energy suffused them. Cold and withdrawn the idoneth may have been, but there was something buried deep in their spirit that longed to cut loose on a wild hunt.