Chapter 33
‘We are honoured, of course, to have such a revered mage living so close.’ The guide, who had told them his name was Liamat, nodded his head so deeply it was almost a bow.
‘It will be my pleasure to take you to the path that leads to Prideful Leap, where you may find Mother Maura. For the nominal fee of three gold pieces.’
Elver wandered a few steps away, letting Sunay handle the negotiation.
The little shed where the guide waited for potential customers was painted a dusty pink and there were rows of shelves inside covered with figurines made of clay.
Most of them were of the Bloody Claw, and you could buy them, according to the sign, for a few coppers each.
A number of the ornaments were of the shattered mountain itself.
Elver’s eyes drifted to the window where the real thing waited for them; a range of stone so dark it was almost purple, where some huge cataclysm had reformed it into a series of jagged, lethal-looking shapes that almost seemed to defy gravity in places.
Looking at it made Elver uneasy. Something had happened to this place, something unnatural.
‘Mother Maura my wrinkled old arse.’
Elver startled. The bundled shape she’d taken to be a pile of cloth and furs was in fact a tiny old woman. A face like a pickled apple glared at her from within a rabbit skin scarf.
‘Nana, please,’ said the guide. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
‘All I’m doing is telling the truth that you don’t dare tell these wandering idiots.’ The old woman almost seemed to bounce to her feet. Elver had the impression of a tiny, coiled spring, ready to erupt. ‘The truth about Mother Maura.’
‘And what truth is that?’ asked Elver. Sunay had paused in the act of handing over gold coins, her eyebrows raised.
‘Do not listen to her,’ said Liamat, a faintly pained smile on his face. ‘Mother Maura is a very respected mage, and we would not want to besmirch her good name …’
‘Balls,’ said Nana. She sprung across the little hut and snatched a gnarled walking stick from where it leaned against the wall. ‘Pay my idiot grandchild and I will take you to Prideful Leap myself. Not all the way up to it, mind. I don’t have a bleedin’ death wish.’
‘That’s enough, Nana. Please, I will gather my things and we can set off immediately,’ said Liamat, in what he clearly thought was a no-nonsense tone, but Sunay had already pressed the coins into his hand.
‘We will take this one,’ she said, nodding at Nana. ‘Thanks all the same.’
Outside, the sky was filled with dark clouds, glowering as though in competition with the mountain, and a row of leafless trees stood like a skeletal chorus against the horizon; winter had come early to this part of the world.
Nana led them along a path of small white stones, the brightest thing in that darkened landscape.
As she walked, she stabbed the ground with her stick as though it had done her a personal insult.
‘How long will this take?’ asked Elver.
‘Patience is a virtue, did you know that?’ Nana looked her up and down.
Her eyes were blue and very, very sharp.
‘No, I don’t suppose you do. It’ll take all of this morning and mayhaps most of the afternoon, because the shattered mountain is not a sensible place to take a leisurely stroll.
But I’ll keep you entertained on the way, don’t you worry none. ’
‘Yes,’ said Sunay brightly. ‘The truth about this Mother Maura is something we are very interested in.’
They moved down the path into a ravine where the little white stones ended. Here the earth was raw and red, like a wound. Elver spotted a weathered wooden sign planted in the dirt, carved with signs she didn’t recognize and an arrow pointing east.
‘Why are you two going there?’ asked Nana. ‘You don’t look like her usual type, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. You’re too cheerful,’ she said, jabbing the end of her stick in Sunay’s direction, ‘and this one looks as though she’d sooner chew her own arm off than ask for help from anyone.’
‘I am setting up a new business,’ said Sunay with the smooth delivery of an accomplished liar. ‘And my good friend Elver here is my business partner. We seek a spell to outfox our rivals, and the blessings of the god of ambition. We’ve heard that ambition is Maura’s speciality.’
Nana snorted. The ravine twisted up through the landscape like a snake. Splintered boulders as big as houses towered on every side. Elver wondered again what kind of violence had shaped the place.
‘You got that much right,’ said Nana. ‘But it wasn’t always the case. Would it surprise you to know that when she was a young woman, she laughed a lot? Always laughing, that one. She took very little seriously, did Maura, when she was a slip of a thing, but she was a natural mage.’
‘Her reputation is, uh, not for laughter,’ said Sunay, glancing quickly at Elver. ‘It is hard to picture a mage of the Bloody Claw with a sense of humour, I must admit.’
‘Oh, she wasn’t dedicated to the Bloody Claw then, oh no. It was Tisk, the god of lies and mischief.’
Elver watched Sunay blink several times and then give a hearty chuckle that didn’t quite convince.
‘Haha, I see now why your grandson was keen to keep you in the shed, Nana.’ Sunay wagged a finger at the old woman.
‘You’re quite the jester it seems. Everyone knows that the god you form a bond with is for life.
It’s not something you can change as you see fit, like your trousers or your haircut or your feelings about blue cheese. ’
‘Even so, she did it,’ said Nana. She came to a halt, using the pointy end of her walking stick to scratch an itch on her shin.
The path was taking them steeply up at an angle, and thanks to the looming rocks of all sizes it was hard to see where they would be heading next.
Elver thought of Artair and wondered where he was and what he was doing.
Or what Lucian was doing. It was impossible to say who might be in control, but she guessed that if he had any choice, Artair would have been on their trail.
She strongly suspected he had no choice.
‘How?’ said Sunay.
‘Why?’ asked Elver.
Nana made a satisfied little noise.
‘Well, Maura of old, you see, she was young, and she had a sweetheart, and in time they had babies, like sweethearts sometimes do. Happy, they was, for a while. Oh, Maura would do little pieces of magic for those that needed it—a little glamour for the girl hoping to catch a young man’s eye, a story for a man who needed to wriggle his way out of some commitment, an unbreakable alibi for a miscreant—’
‘All good, honest spells,’ put in Sunay.
‘But her real love was for those kiddies.’ Nana had grown quieter, and not, Elver sensed, because the road was harder. ‘Maura doted on them, and her husband. You never saw her without one baby or the other in her arms.’
‘You knew them, didn’t you?’ said Elver.
Nana sighed, and they started walking again.
‘We lived in a village not far from here. One tavern, two horses and a blacksmiths sort of place. You won’t find it on any maps now, because, well…
I used to watch the babies for her sometimes, when she was away and her husband was busy.
They were good little mites really, better than Liamat was at that age anyway. ’
They turned a corner and to their left the world dropped away, giving them a view of the guide’s shed. From their vantage point it looked tiny, like a fingernail dropped onto the landscape.
‘What happened to them?’
‘Thirty years ago, long before either of you were a twinkle in some rogue’s eye and I had a rear end you could bounce a gold piece off of…
’ The old woman paused while Sunay had a coughing fit.
‘Thirty years ago, there was a minor spat between the Twelve. Now then. A minor spat between the gods can have devastating consequences for us lowly mortals, right? If they’ve set their minds to knocking seven flavours of shit out of each other, there’s little we can do but watch and hope we survive it. ’
‘Which gods?’ asked Sunay.
‘The main players were Trilot, the faceless one,’ said Nana.
‘And himself, the Bloody Claw. What the disagreement was about, I don’t know, and I reckon no mortal does, but it was our world that bore the brunt of it alright.
Maura was away, doing some elaborate illusion for a minor duke, when Trilot shattered the mountain with a blast of his purifying light—a blow meant for the Bloody Claw that missed.
You can see what happened to the place.’ She gestured with her stick at the near-purple boulders that clustered around them on the mountain path.
‘We had an avalanche,’ she continued. ‘Half the mountain turned to powder and dumped on our heads. And, well… It could have been me, that’s what I always think.
If her husband hadn’t been home to look after those kiddies, I would have been the one inside their little cottage when it was flattened. ’
Silence pooled between them for a moment. Overhead, Elver heard the call of an eagle and she thought of Fleet, out running with wolves somewhere. Her hand closed over the conker in her pocket.
‘What I remember,’ said the old woman, ‘and I reckon I’ll remember it forever, is the sound she made when she found out.
Such sorrow, such horror. It turned her mind on a pin, that moment, that’s what I think, and she went to her Lord Tisk and asked him, told him: bring them back.
I’ll pay any price, but bring them back. ’
‘Tisk cannot do that kind of magic,’ said Sunay. All the usual humour had leached from her voice, leaving it wan and pale. ‘None of the gods can, not even the Hooded Crow.’
‘Maura wouldn’t accept it. She was convinced that there had to be a power large enough to bring her loved ones back from the shadowed lands, and her need for that power changed her.
She was a child of the fox and she became a creature of the lion.
Instead of laughter on her lips, it was blood, and a dagger in her hand. ’
‘It’s not possible,’ Sunay insisted, although she sounded much less certain. ‘At least, it shouldn’t be.’
‘Seems to me that lots of things are possible that shouldn’t be,’ said Nana. ‘What I know for certain is that Maura changed, and that laughing girl was never seen again. Fury and a lust for power are what drive her now.’
‘She’ll destroy as many lives as she likes to get what she wants,’ said Elver. She was thinking of the novices they intended to save. And herself, thrown from the top of the Tumble Stone.
‘So, are you sure?’ Nana stopped and turned to them both, her eyes narrowed so that they looked to be caught in a fine net of wrinkles.
‘Are you sure this is the path you must take? Because the price for her bloody work is a high one.’ She cleared her throat.
‘This is why Liamat doesn’t want me guiding travellers up here, but I think you should know. You should be warned.’
Elver exchanged a look with Sunay. ‘We’re sure, Nana,’ she said. ‘This is the path we have to walk.’
They came within sight of Prideful Leap just as the sun touched the western horizon, flooding the valley below with golden light.
It was a rambling building of white marble seen from this distance, a pearl wedged in the midst of the mountain’s shattered purple heart.
Elver looked at it and wondered what it meant, that Maura had chosen to build her sanctum here, amongst the very stones that had buried her old life.
‘This is as far as I’ll go,’ said Nana. The old woman had barely broken a sweat during their long climb.
‘By all reports she don’t like to be reminded of what went before, so I prefer to keep out of her sight.
But you can see the path easily from here.
’ She pointed, and sure enough, there was a jagged and meandering way, punctuated here and there with stunted, wizened little trees clinging to the rock.
‘Thank you, Nana,’ said Sunay, slipping the old woman an extra gold piece. ‘It’s been enlightening.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ said Nana as she turned to go. ‘That magpie has nothing but rage left in her heart.’