LITMIR.BIZ

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once, then disappeared into the mists. Zayn clutched the spirit staff and sat perfectly still. The hard slimy rock under him, the cold, his hunger – they were nothing to him, who could crouch for hours on his hands and knees in order to overhear some conversation between suspect officers or to see some forbidden meeting. The fog above turned a brighter silver to signal that noon had arrived in the world beyond the Mistlands. The warm and bitter-scented water lapped and splashed at the edge of the island. Zayn waited, staring into the mists.

      He was floating in a room or seeing it in a dream; he was never sure which, but the room looked as vivid as if he stood in some sort of brothel, a handsome well-appointed place, anyway, where men sat in a haze of hashish smoke, and unveiled women moved among them with plates of food on silver trays. Sitting in one corner was a man with a military posture and thick streaks of grey in his hair, not a bad-looking fellow for his age, but Zayn hated him the moment he saw him. He looked sober, barely touched by the smoke in his safe little corner, while he peered out at the room with such a knowing little smirk, such a look of contempt for the people he watched that Zayn wanted to kill him. He would be doing the world a favour if he removed this empty husk of a man, who reminded him of nothing so much as a scavenger lizard, feeding off the deaths of others. His hand on the hilt of his knife, Zayn moved towards the fellow, who turned and looked him straight in the face. At that moment, Zayn recognized him: it was himself, the same face that he saw every morning when he shaved, merely some twenty years older.

      The sound of a cry broke the vision. Zayn was on his feet, his knife in hand, before he realized that he’d made the cry himself.

      ‘No! God forgive me! No!’

      A terror that he couldn’t understand clutched him as he paced back and forth on the rocky islet. Maybe he should throw himself into the lake to drown, if his life was going to come to that, those sunken eyes, possessed by a simple ugly emptiness, a man with nothing to live for but revenge.

      ‘I’ll get back at you. I’ll get back at all of you.’

      Whom was he talking to? He didn’t know, only knew that he’d lived the promise in that voice for years now, four long years that he suddenly saw as an arrow, flying straight into the future and leading him to the brothel of his vision.

      ‘It isn’t true. You’re tired. You’re hungry. This place is enough to drive any man crazy. It’s just a kind of dream, like you get when you’re feverish.’

      But the memory of the smirk stayed with him, and the bright little eyes of a scavenger – some scrabbling land crab, collecting the droppings of stronger beasts and pushing them back to its lair, as proud as it could be of its collection of dung. His own metaphor made him shudder. He walked round and round the island and looked for the crane.

      ‘Come back, little brother! Don’t leave me here alone! Please come back, please.’

      The water splashed on the rock like one of Ammadin’s incantations, a constant murmur of sound. For all that he desperately tried to talk himself round, Zayn felt magic all around him. It was as if magic were a person who was watching him, spying on him, following every move he made. He felt it as a coldness down his back, a prickling of his skin such as a wild animal must feel when the hunter stalks close.

      Abruptly he realized that the noon-glow was long gone and the mists were turning a steely grey. When he thought of staying out all night, he was so frightened that his stomach clenched, and he dropped to his knees to vomit. Since he’d eaten nothing in a long time, all that came up was the lime-bitter water. This spasm of fear convinced him to stay. He’d conquered a hundred other fears; he could conquer this new one, not of death or torture, but of seeing too much. He went to the edge of the island and knelt down, scooping up water in his hands to wash the foamy vomit from his mouth. All at once he heard the crane, shrieking what sounded like a warning overhead. Out of sheer reflex he threw himself to one side.

      The arrow sped by him.

      It came so fast, hissing through the air, that he thought he’d imagined it until another shaft sped out of the mist and struck with a clatter on the rock just behind him. Zayn screamed a gurgling imitation of a death-cry, then pitched himself head-first into the water. The warm darkness enveloped him, as languid as a bath. In the shallow water he could not swim, but he forced himself down to the bottom and, crawling more than swimming, managed to reach the spread of water rushes. Among them he could half-stand, half-crouch on the muddy bottom with just his face out of the water – an imperfect shelter if his unknown attacker chose to send a volley his way. For a long time he heard nothing but the splash of water; then distantly came the sound of someone laughing. So. The fool thought he’d killed him, did he?

      Smiling to himself, Zayn began to crawl sideways, dropping to his knees under the water and holding his breath until his chest ached like fire. At last he risked coming up in the shelter of rocks and water weeds. Out in the lake on the other side of the island, a man was slogging towards him. Even in the mist, he recognized Palindor. The old border adage was holding true: insult a comnee man – fight for your life.

      Zayn slipped the long knife free of his belt, then crouched again, leaning back so that his face was barely out of the water. He heard splashing as Palindor climbed onto the island and the wet slapping steps of bare feet as he walked across. When Zayn risked another look, Palindor was standing some twenty feet away.

      Slowly, carefully, Zayn began to climb up the rocky bank of the island. His back towards him, Palindor unstrung the bow and began using it like a staff to poke amongst the rushes. Zayn gained the ground and straightened up, his knife ready in his hand.

      ‘Looking for me?’

      When Palindor spun around, Zayn charged, racing across the rocks. Palindor dropped the bow and grabbed at the knife at his side, but Zayn reached him before it was out of the sheath. In a futile attempt to protect himself, Palindor flung up his left arm. Zayn grabbed it, swung him around off-balance, and slipped with his enemy. As they went down, Zayn wrestled him round and fell on top of him. He stabbed with the long knife at the base of the neck, one quick blow that severed the spine. Palindor whimpered, twitched convulsively, then lay still.

      ‘You stupid little bastard! I’m not even the reason you couldn’t have her.’

      Zayn wiped his knife on Palindor’s shirt, then sheathed it. He decided that he’d better not tell the comnee about this, but then it occurred to him that Palindor had committed a grave crime, stalking a man during his vision quest. He took the dropped bow and unbuckled the quiver of arrows hung on Palindor’s belt. They were solid evidence that Palindor intended to murder, not challenge him.

      Far off in the mists came a rasping cry that was doubtless meant to sound like a swamp lizard’s croak. Zayn froze, his hands tight on the quiver. That Palindor could find allies for an impious murder was the last thing that Zayn ever would have suspected from the Tribes, but the cry came again, seemingly closer. In the mist and wind it could have come from any direction. Zayn strung the bow and stuck the quiver down the front of his shirt. Crouching low, he trotted to the edge of the island and slid off into waist-deep water, but he held the bow up to keep the bowstring dry. Moving as silently as he could, slipping a bit on the muddy bottom, he started back for the hummock that marked the path to the lake shore. All he wanted was to get out of there before he was forced to kill another comnee man. He heard the false lizard cry again, desperate now, insistent for an answer.

      When he reached the first hummock, Zayn stayed in the water. It was too dangerous to clamber up and expose his back to an arrow. But how deep did the water lie here? At that he remembered the spirit staff, left behind on the islet. All his instincts told him to leave it there and run for his life, but he felt that to lose the staff meant losing the manhood he’d come here to gain. He crouched low, holding the bow free of the water, and waited. The mewling cry came loud out of the mists on the far side of the islet. When he looked back, he could just see the dark shape of Palindor’s corpse.

      Keeping the island in sight, Zayn circled round in the direction of the cry to stalk the man stalking him. The wall of mist receded ahead of him as he waded through the lake, and slowly there appeared dark shapes that had to be another chain of hummocks and rocks. All at once he saw the spirit

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