by Ember Lane
“Where do we need to go?” Frank asked, but Merl already knew.
“The university,” he said. “Next tier down from the top.” Merl glanced around as he tried to spy the evil coming for them.
Frank equipped Scaramanza. He tossed Merl his cleaver, and Billy his stupid elfen sword. A staff appeared in Desmelda’s hand.
“We stand shoulder to shoulder with your guard and fight,” Frank told Baldrock, his tone leaving no room for dissent, but the guardian didn’t answer to Frank.
“Merl will guide you. Your success hangs by a thread. We will delay the dastaries, but we will not defeat them. Your help will not matter one way or the other. You must retrieve Quaiyl and continue the prophecy.”
“Together, we could beat them together,” Frank pleaded, but Baldrock was already descending the steps.
“No, we couldn’t, Wizard of Quintz. Save your bravado and protect that which is precious to the land.”
Billy drew aside Frank, clearly ready to fight anyone. Desmelda thumped her staff on the stone steps. Her mouth was set in a thin, straight line, and her eyes were narrow and afire with rage. “I hate dastaries.”
From the sound of them, Merl was in little doubt that most folk would, but he was more interested in the prophecy that Baldrock had just mentioned. Desmelda had talked about one on the ship and hinted that Merl might be following one but had admitted she had never heard it. Baldrock, on the other hand, obviously had.
“Go to the university,” he urged Frank. “We’re looking for something called Quaiyl. I’ll be back.”
“Where are you—” Frank began to ask, but Merl was already bounding down the steps.
“Just start looking!” Merl shouted back.
He jumped the stone steps two at a time. A dozen yards beyond their base, Baldrock held his line with his twelve companions. They had formed a wide semicircle and were facing down the vale. At the vale’s end, a dark shadow was covering the lush green grass. “Dasteries!” Merl cried, guessing that was what they were.
The shadow’s point was huge, and it marched toward them like an arrow of black evil. As Merl leapt the last few steps and darted over the tumbled wall, the dastaries shimmered and suddenly closed as if they’d all just taken a giant step. It was then Merl saw the dreadnail. He felt its eyes on him, trying to suck him into its dire mind.
“Take care, Baldrock, they are a lot closer than they look!” Merl screamed at the top of his voice, knowing everything they were seeing was an illusion.
The dastaries were the guise of The Great Devil himself. Frank was right, they were no soldiers. They were no infantry. They were killing beasts and that was that. Red eyes peered out from black helmets. Yellow fangs poked up from growling maws framed with dull-glinting cheek guards. They had necks the size of tree trunks, and shoulders like boulders. Each was armed with a huge great club, spiked like a spittin’ river urchin. The ground rumbled as they marched and lurched, and marched and lurched some more. Merl guessed there were fifty of them. The guardians’ line of thirteen looked pretty fragile.
Merl grabbed Baldrock, spinning the soldier around. “You have to tell me, what prophecy?”
Baldrock looked both shocked and angry. His expression morphed through a dozen more emotions. “Get out! Get out of here!” he cried. “Find Quaiyl.”
“What prophecy?” Merl insisted and fixed his stare on Baldrock, but part of it bled over the man’s shoulder. The dastaries were close. They stopped marching and formed up into chunky ranks. Raising their spiked clubs, they roared as one and then burst forward. Behind them, the dreadnail stared, its focus intent only on Merl. Its kaleidoscopic eyes bored into Merl, sucking his willpower away and drawing Merl’s focus from Baldrock, as the beast bent it to its own.
Merl fought though, his mind much stronger than before. “What prophecy?” he demanded once more. “I’m not going until you tell me!”
Baldrock relented. “I don’t know,” he shouted, urgency engulfing him. “I just know there’s a prophecy. You need to go Withering Tree and seek out Stobart Torped. He knows. He understands. He created us.”
“Created you?”
The dastaries crashed into the guardian line. Merl could smell the stench of their acrid sweat. Their growls rolled over him like demonic thunder, as club was met with staff and sword, and the guardians sprang into action.
“Withering Tree. Stobart Torped. Instruct Quaiyl to show you the way!” Baldrock shoved Merl back. “Go! Go! Else all is lost.”
“But—” Merl cried.
“But nothing, go!”
Merl dithered a fraction, then scrambled through the tumbled wall and ran up the first few steps. Doubt riddled him. He turned back to see the guardians in action. They fought like ghosts, like assassins, like heroes. They moved like Frank did when he was in action. Fluid, fast, a blur of action; the first dastaries fell, but their tide was too strong. Their number was too many. Merl stepped back. He climbed the next step, but his feet were heavy. His legs like lead.
“Why fight, Merl?” Like its eyes, the dreadnail’s words swirled around in curling fingers of invititation and enticement. “Come with us. Stay with us. Live like the king you are.”
Merl forced himself up to the next step. He leaned forward, as if trying to climb through air as thick as his dad’s porridge. “No! No, I won’t come with you. You’re evil,” Merl growled through his clamped jaw.
“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s us and not your companions?”
Merl struggled forward. He inched his foot onto the next step. “Go, go away!” But Merl turned, and he saw the raggedy creature. Its arms were spread wide. Its folds of blackened skin hung down, and its sweet scent assailed Merl’s nostrils. He dove into its eyes, finding nothing but peace and surety. The guardian numbers were thinning. Dastarie clubs were falling.
Then Merl noticed the guardians didn’t bleed. They didn’t cry out. They diminished, faded, and vanished. The shock of it tore his focus from the dreadnail. Merl hesitated for a mere instant, before he bolted up the steps.
He heard a roar, a great and thunderous roar. The last of the guardians had fallen. He stared up the hill, at its overshadowing golden bowl, and knew he had no chance of ever making the top. Merl turned and his anger grew. The dastaries were storming forward.
“Wall!” he screamed. “Build level-one wall!”
The line of tumbled stone shimmered gold, huge pillars of swirling magic reaching upward. It ringed the hill in golden iridescence and cut Merl off from the bastard dastaries. The dreadnail’s hold on him broke in an instant, and Merl hurtled up the steps, the power of fear driving his legs.
He passed the cottage tiers, and then sprinted across a wider plateau that he somehow knew had once housed manufacturing buildings like the smithy, the crafting workshop, the spinner and weaver, and the cobbler. After forging up another, he dashed across the next. Its vast mud shelf was spread with the decaying ruins of the city’s military might: its barracks, its range, and its stables. The penultimate steps took him to the smallest tier. He hesitated then, knowing it to be the one he needed, but desperately wanting to climb to the hill’s top and discover what was there.
Below, the golden aura surrounding the wall had faded. Merl’s wall stood proud, not huge—a mere level-one—but it was there. It held back the dastaries, but Merl knew it wouldn’t last long. They were already pounding on the wall’s feeble, level-one gate, and after they breached it, they would soon scale the steps. Merl had used his magic, but it wouldn’t protect them for long.
“Merl!” Frank’s voice called out, cutting through Merl’s despair. “Do you know which one would have been the university?”
Merl ran toward him, but his path was as erratic as his mind. He darted into one ruin, but quickly decided it must have been an embassy. He tore through it to the next, but it had once been a guild hall. Frank and Billy waited a little farther along, standing between some stone pilasters.
“That was the temple!” Merl cried, and bounded past them. “
That one. That one there,” he said, pointing around the hill’s edge to blue-stone ruins and littered black slates. Desmelda was picking among its debris, holding up fragments of stained glass to the noon sun.
Merl sidestepped Frank and Billy. He hurdled a pile of timber, and he clambered over some stone until he was within the university’s ruins. It then dawned on him he had no clue who or what Quaiyl was. He scoured desperately around, searching through moss-cloaked brick. Tufts of grass sprouted from eruptions of mosaic tiles. Ivy choked gothic-arched roof trusses.
“What are we looking for?” Billy asked, but Merl could only shrug.
“Something called Quaiyl,” he said.
“Quaiyl?” Billy repeated.
“What in Andula’s name is a Quaiyl?” Desmelda asked.
“Some kind of bird, I think,” Frank said, but then the sky cracked like it was splitting in half, and a voice thundered overhead.
“Thrice said. Origin summoned.”
“What the heck…” Billy gasped.
Merl’s eyes fell upon a figure that was slowly emerging from the very ground itself. He looked on with both fear and awe. The figure rose, casting the mosaic aside. It soon stood before him, shaped like a small human the color of a brooding thunderhead. It had no features, bereft of eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Not a single hair graced its body, which appeared to be made of some oily substance and yet appeared as dense as solid rock. It said nothing. It did nothing.
A triumphant roar belted out from below.
“The dastaries have breached the gates,” Merl told them all.
“What gates?” Frank asked, stepping back from Quaiyl and glancing down the slope toward Merl’s new wall. “The gates in the wall, I suppose,” he said and shrugged in acceptance.
“What wall?” asked Desmelda, her own gaze transfixed on Quaiyl. She, too, stepped away, standing aside Frank. She whispered something to him, but he merely shrugged. She grabbed him, and spun him around. “That wall,” she growled. “Where did it come from?”
Frank shrugged again.
“We best get movin’,” Billy said. “Them dastaries look like nutters.”
Merl knelt in front of Quaiyl. “Are you The Origin? Will you take me to Stobart Torped?”
Quaiyl didn’t answer. It merely started running north and west, directly away from the gates and the dastaries.
“Who is…?” Desmelda began asking, but Merl ran after Quaiyl as the featureless creation sprinted diagonally out of the ruined university and off the edge of the tier. It traversed the drop and ran to the next and then went across it in a dead straight line. It continued on its path until it came to Merl’s level-one wall and could go no farther. Quaiyl turned one way. It spun around and faced the next, and then turned back to face the wall.
“It wants to go that way,” Merl said.
Frank tumbled down the final slope. He quickly composed and raised his hand. “Stand back,” he spat, and once they’d cleared him a spot, he blasted a hole in the wall.
Quaiyl ran through the opening. Merl clawed his way through, soon followed by Gloomy Joe. Billy squeezed after. The vulgaries roared in glee as they spied the fleeing party. They jumped and tumbled down the hill toward the hole. Desmelda and Frank squeezed through, and then the witch from Falling Glen deployed her own magic and wove a thorn barrier across it.
Desmelda sprinted after Billy and Merl. “It won’t hold long, but it’ll give us a head start on those bastard dasteries.”
They followed Quaiyl up an escarpment edging the strange vale. Billy glanced back, but then tripped, rolling head over foot until he stopped, but his eyes never left The Hill of One. “What the heck?” he said, “I just rolled uphill?”
Merl stopped and turned. Frank and Desmelda then looked. Behind them, the hill was afire, yet it was no normal flame that kissed its ruined banks. It was like the air itself was blazing, consuming all: the wall, the steps, the ruins, and even the great golden bowl sitting upon its wispy cloud. The inferno quickly consumed all, and for just an instant, Merl saw the hill in its unadorned form. It looked familiar. It brought warmth to his heart. Bare, it was clear the hill had been fashioned by man, but before he could truly study it, it shimmered and vanished. Not a trace of the Guild of One remained. Not a trace of Merl’s their hill was left. No dastarie nor dreadnail survived.
The Isle of One became a mere island.
Ahead, Quaiyl waited. Billy pushed himself up and approached the creation. He leaned down, staring into where its eyes should be. He poked it. Quaiyl blurred, moved like a flash of lightning. The featureless creature pushed Billy away with tremendous force, then returned to its statuesque pose in an instant. Billy, however, was flying through the air and landed with a thud around ten yards away.
“Bloody hell, Billy,” Merl said. “Best not to poke it again.”
Billy sat up. “Bloody hell, Merl. Don’t think I will, like.”
Merl moved toward Billy, intent on giving him a hand up. As he did, Quaiyl walked on. Merl stopped. Quaiyl stopped.
“I think it can only be so far away from you, Merl,” Frank said, regarding it but keeping his distance. “What did the voice call it?”
“The Origin,” Desmelda replied.
“But you’re calling it Quaiyl?” Frank asked Merl.
“That’s what Baldrock called it. I think it’s called Quaiyl but is The Origin.”
“And he was the one that asked you to seek out Stobart Torped.”
“Yes,” said Merl. “At a place called The Withering Tree.”
Frank took a deep breath. “Then we’d best follow the little fella in case this Withering Tree is on the island.”
Merl walked toward Quaiyl, who in turn walked away.
They followed the strange creation for the rest of the afternoon, passing through forest and vale, though dingle and dale, all the while headed downward and to the coast. Just before dusk, they ran out of land, and Quaiyl stood before the stretching sea.
“I guess it’s that way, then,” Billy said.
17
Merl sighed again. He hadn’t stopped sighing since they’d boarded Wave Walker. Gloomy Joe hadn’t stopped barking at Quaiyl. And Billy hadn’t stopped drinking ale.
“Do you think it can hear us?” Billy asked, sitting at the adventurers’ bar and supping on some giant ale.
Quaiyl was standing and facing the steps that led up to their sleeping quarters. Merl and Gloomy Joe sat close to it. Gloomy Joe growled, which turned into a splutter, and the dune dog finally stopped barking at the strange being, choosing to snore instead. Gloomy Joe had taken little notice of it while they’d followed The Origin across the island, but as soon as they’d boarded Stormsurfer’s rowboat he had begun growling. Now, Gloomy Joe had either accepted Quaiyl as one of the party or was simply too tired to bother.
“I think,” Merl replied. “It can see, hear, and understand everything we say and do.”
“Bugger,” said Billy. “Coz it creeps me out, it does, like.”
“Tossed you like a baby,” Merl pointed out.
“Did not,” Billy spat. “I jus’ weren’t ready fer it.”
“Tossed you like a baby,” Frank added, grinning from ear to ear.
Billy reared up, but soon deflated. He’d never take on Frank.
“Do you think it’d protect you?” Billy asked, a devious look flickering across his face.
“Protect me?” Merl took a sip of ale.
“Like, if Frank were to attack you, like. Do you think it would jump in and protect you?”
“Why me?” Frank asked.
“Buggered if I’m gonna do it,” Billy said, spinning on his stool and leaning back. “As you lot enjoy pointing out, already been tossed by the blighter.”
“Why would Frank attack Merl?” Desmelda enquired. She glanced up, momentarily stopping her in-depth study of a particularly nasty-looking skull.
Billy grinned. “It’s not Frank that’s important. Say we go to this Witherin’ Tree an’ a bunch
of dirty elves attack us, shouldn’t we know if tha little thing will protect Merl or not, like?”
Frank cocked his head. “You might have a point, Billy Muckspreader.”
“Well, go on, then,” Billy goaded.
“It would be interesting to know,” Desmelda admitted, but Merl doubted she was that interested. He sensed she just wanted to see Frank tossed.
Frank jumped off his stool. “Do you mind, Merl?”
“Of course I bloody well mind. Especially if you’re gonna whack me,” Merl protested, but then he relented when Billy made a few underhand gestures of encouragement. “Go on, then.” Merl said, sulkily, and he stood facing Frank. “Doubt Quaiyl’s going to do defend me or anything so you go soft in me, Frank.”
“Why?” Frank asked, jumping from foot to foot and thumping his fist into his open palm. “Why go soft? All or nothing.” Now Frank had a mischievous look in his eye.
“Bloody hell, Frank, we’re only playin’,” Merl protested.
“It’ll know if it isn’t realistic.”
Merl gulped. “It’s not even lookin’ in the right bloody direction.”
Frank ran at him, his fists ready. Quaiyl instantly appeared between them. The Origin pushed its hand out, stopping Frank dead. It grabbed him, spun him around, and threw him away. Frank sailed through the air and crashed against the bar’s wall, sliding down to the floor and into a crumpled, groaning, heap.
“Reckon that’s our answer,” Desmelda crowed, picking up Frank and brushing him down.
Quaiyl returned and faced the wall.
Merl breathed a sigh of relief. “You okay, Frank?”
“Had worse, far worse. At least we know Merl will be safe,” Frank replied, ruffling the dust from his hair as if he could brush the swift beating out of him. “Okay, what do we know?” Frank returned to his stool at the bar and took a large slurp on his ale.
“Eh?” Billy said.
Frank sighed. “What do we know about everything? We’ve got enough time all the while we’re at sea. Let’s stick our heads together and work out exactly where we are. We can’t keep thrashing around blindly.”