The oranges she’d been retrieving bounced out of her hands and rolled away.
“Jasen,” she said after a moment’s panicked look.
He stooped to pick up one of the oranges. It had gone a bit soft here at sea—no telling how long it had been in the barrel for—and the fall had split the skin. Juice, sticky and sweet, had leaked out and left a trail on the floor where it rolled. It coated his fingers.
“Now I know why you’re never around at mealtimes,” he said.
Alixa snatched it off of him. “I don’t want to eat with you.”
She made to pass him—
Jasen wheeled about, following quickly behind. “Wait!”
“No.”
“Alixa!” he called—she was marching down the central aisle, an orange in each hand. An unevenly broken wedge of hardtack stuck out of one pocket, wrapped in a thin square of fabric.
“I don’t want to talk with you either,” she said, without looking back.
“Why not?” For goodness' sake, she was being so—“Why not?” Jasen repeated, catching up to her. “I’m your cousin, for crying out loud.”
She snorted sarcastic laughter.
“What is so funny?” Jasen demanded, getting right in front of her.
She stopped, but only long enough to give him a dark look. Then she sidestepped and was past again.
“What’s funny,” she answered, not looking back, “is that you think that I owe you some sort of duty by being your cousin, when you yourself don’t show the same duty to me—or any of our ancestors.”
“I do show my duty to them,” Jasen said. “I’ve been searching for Baraghosa for over a month now.”
“And in that time you have learned that he had nothing to do with the fall of Terreas,” Alixa said, “but you still want to pursue him. Is that duty? Not to our families, it’s not.”
Jasen’s lips thinned. He couldn’t help himself from clenching his fists. Damned Alixa—when had she started to frustrate him like this?
“Baraghosa is evil,” he said.
Alixa whirled. Jabbing him in the chest with a finger, she said, “Admit it. You know Baraghosa did not destroy Terreas. Go on, admit you’re just being bullheaded and stubborn.”
“He did not destroy Terreas,” Jasen said.
“Hah!” And she spun on her heel and marched away.
For someone so small, she could certainly move when she wanted to. Jasen hurried to catch up. “Just because he did not destroy Terreas does not mean he is innocent of sin. Or absent malice.”
“So let Longwell and Huanatha deal with it,” Alixa said. “Ancestors know they’re foolish enough.”
Jasen caught himself before he could retort. Longwell and Huanatha, foolish? They were the least foolish people Jasen had ever met. Perhaps there was a touch of arrogance to Longwell. And Huanatha certainly had an abrasive streak to her.
But foolish? Absolutely not. No, they knew what was right. They knew their duty, a duty to an entire world Baraghosa threatened.
“Baraghosa must be stopped,” said Jasen.
“By men,” Alixa answered, “not a boy.” She laid her own venom into that last word—boy—and combined with the sidelong glance she shot him, it stung, enough that Jasen was close, again, to losing his temper with her.
Somehow, though it took muscles he didn’t know he had to do it, he kept himself in check.
“You agreed with me,” he said, “before our last battle. You said it yourself, you agreed that we should stop him.”
“When you’re surrounded by imbeciles for long enough, you start to think like them.”
He gritted his teeth, but instead of speaking, he let himself think for a moment. There had to be some other way to make Alixa understand why this was so important, why he had to do it—and why she should too. Because, no, Terreas had not been Baraghosa’s doing … but Baraghosa had meddled in it for decades, disrupting lives—
“You say I have no duty to my village,” Jasen said, “but what about Pityr? He was our friend. Baraghosa took him—took him to die.”
Alixa flinched at the mention of Pityr’s name. When he had been taken, it was like a part of Terreas had died, at least for them. Some of the joy had left it, never to return.
That was Baraghosa’s doing. And Alixa had surely felt it, as deeply as Jasen. It was, after all, what drove them together—a bond forged in sadness.
“There are more Luukessians than Pityr,” she said. “I have a duty to all of them.”
Jasen shook his head. “I cannot believe you’d say that.”
“And I cannot believe everything that comes from your mouth these days.”
“Pityr would want him stopped.”
Alixa spun. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes were fiery.
“What Pityr would want is for both of us to continue to the Emerald Fields—to carry on surviving, rather than dying for … for this poxy stupidity. If you have any sense of duty to him, any at all, you would come to the Emerald Fields, instead of letting yourself die at the hands of a man who has already shown himself capable of crippling you without even a touch.”
They stood like that for a moment, at an impasse. Jasen realized that they’d come to the stairs leading out to the top deck. He could hear, through the door at the top of them, a little hubbub, conversations and shouts between the Lady Vizolans as they tended to the vast galley.
“I am absolutely certain in my conviction he must be stopped,” Jasen said quietly. “That stopping him is more important than anything else right now.”
“So try to stop him,” Alixa said. “But know that it will cost you your life.”
He came close to telling her, then and there, that whether Baraghosa did him in or not, his life was already lost, the sands of it slipping through his fingers with every passing second—
But there came a shout from the deck, a cry that was not conversation, but a noise of alarm.
Jasen and Alixa’s eyebrows knitted. They looked up the stairs—
“Something’s up,” said Jasen.
“Brilliant,” Alixa muttered, already climbing the steps two at a time. “When isn’t something up?”
Jasen followed, taking the steps two at a time for the first half of the stairway. But fatigue suddenly gripped him. The world’s colors went wrong, and there seemed to be a shadowed tunnel between him and it.
Visions lingered about its edges—silhouetted forms, hardly visible against the murk pressing in at the corners of his sight. Like shadows in the light. Familiar ones, at that.
His mother? His father?
They were gone as soon as he’d spied them. By then he was a full six steps behind Alixa. So he hurried, gripping a handrail carved from a single wooden beam for support; he no longer trusted himself not to trip.
Up they went, then out the door, which Alixa threw open—
Nine, maybe ten men were arrayed on the deck.
Another was in the crow’s nest, at the very top of the mainmast. It was he who was shouting down, alarm filling his voice.
Already, another man was mounting the mast, and the steps up it.
The man in the crow’s nest was looking forward. So were the Lady Vizolans, all focused on something on the horizon. From here, the sails were blocking it—so Alixa and Jasen headed forward, striding in lockstep, past the lowest of the sails to see—
Alixa began, “What the—?”
Smoke rose in a dirty smear from a thin sliver of land very far ahead. It was a big billow, too, much larger than a chimney or a signal fire. Too big to be normal …
It struck him at once that what waited ahead was not unlike the smoke that had loomed above Terreas. There, too, black had plumed into the sky in great clouds, far darker and heavier than any chimney or oven could ever have put out. This was something significant, something out of the ordinary.
It was … destruction.
It was …
“Nonthen,” Jasen murmured, a spike of fear in his chest.
16
No
nthen might once have been a grand port city. Now, though …
There was almost nothing left of it. Where a city once stood now lay a smoking crater, a vast piece of the earth just missing, like a child had sunk its fingers into the wet mud beside a pond and scooped it away. Seawater had flowed into the cavity, leaving a great bay where the city had once stood.
Only what had once stood at its edges remained: small shanties and buildings that now wobbled, their foundations shaken by the devastating event that had rendered the city such a hellscape.
People were left though—and there were plenty of them. Most were the dark-skinned men and women native to the coast of Coricuanthi, but there were plenty of sailors from other lands here, too. The boats they had sailed in on were utterly broken too, their fragmented pieces scattered upon the seawater, a huge mass of floating debris that mingled with bits of broken buildings and docks on the surface of the water.
As the Lady Vizola II drew nearer and nearer, the horror became worse as the picture became more distinct. The full span of the devastation was apparent as they entered the crater, which was easily several kilometers across. Terreas could have fit comfortably into this space, probably even two or three copies of it, neighboring fields and all—if, of course, there had been no detritus to block it. Debris utterly covered the ocean’s surface, an endless carpet of it.
There were bodies too. Lots and lots of bodies.
Men and women waded out. They called, in many languages, for loved ones. Jasen heard names, as the Lady Vizola II gradually carved a path through the debris for the newly forged shoreline: Bradley, Noah, Yeshua, Amit, Ru Shi … The two calling that last name, a man and a woman, he with dark skin and she with light caramel, threw themselves into the wet, loping out at an awkward run. Their eyes were on something that floated nearby, and Jasen saw it with horror just as they got there: the body of a child, a girl, who floated with her face under the water and her back to the sky. Her skin was exposed, but Jasen did not realize at first, because where the fabric of her clothes had been burned away, her back was an awful black, as if she’d been seared in a fire.
They dragged her up, calling her name, wailing it. Her mother grasped at the child’s face, tilting it skyward, pleading as she looked into dead, empty eyes.
Her father clutched her to his body. He cried, a pain like none other, into the sky.
The child did not move. She only hung, limp and scorched, oblivious to the agony that tore through her parents.
Jasen touched the pendant about his neck.
And it was the same all around. A few people were pulled from the waters, gasping for breath, groping for a hold on those who wrestled them free. But many more were totally still, all those bodies just floating there, waiting for someone to fish them out.
“What happened here?” Jasen murmured.
Alixa swallowed hard, averting her eyes from the parents of Ru Shi. “I don’t know.”
Burund watched from the deck with the rest of them. Almost all the crew had come to the top deck, to look out at the ruined city. They chattered here and there, in quiet, tense pockets—but mostly there was only silence between them, broken by the hubbub of what remained of the city.
When the Lady Vizola II had come to perhaps a couple of hundred meters from the new shoreline, it stopped. It had crept in ever slower up to now, so at first Jasen did not even realize the vessel’s movement had ceased.
Kuura joined Burund. He spoke to him in their own language, face serious.
Burund listened. Then he nodded, and said just a couple of words back.
Kuura made off. A handful of the Lady Vizola II’s crew followed.
“What’s the problem?” Jasen asked, joining Burund with Alixa in tow.
“The waters grow shallow,” said Burund. “This vessel can get no closer. They are taking a longboat out instead.”
“Let us go with them,” Jasen said, decision coming instantly. “We can help.”
Burund’s lips thinned.
“Please.”
“Fine,” said Burund after a moment. “Go. I am no longer your keeper now.” He watched Jasen carefully. “You understand?”
Jasen nodded. “You’ve watched after me long enough, Shipmaster. Thank you.” He stepped past, heading for one of the longboats being unlashed from the war galley’s side.
Alixa moved toward the hold.
“Where are you going?” Jasen asked.
“Scourgey will want to be on solid ground again.” She disappeared into the ship.
Jasen was not entirely sure just how much of what was left of Nonthen still qualified as “solid,” but he did not argue, just joined the queue, waiting for Alixa’s return.
She was back soon with Scourgey. Scourgey did not seem to be too happy about it, though; she kept her head down, creeping along very close to Alixa’s heel. Alixa patted her gently, trying to soothe her with words. But they did not placate her, the black eyes carrying a vacant, sickly look. When it finally came time for Jasen, Alixa and Scourgey to descend the side of the Lady Vizola II and climb into the first boat, with Huanatha, Longwell, Kuura, and Chaka, she whined madly, her claws clattering on the deck where she shook.
“Come on,” Alixa pleaded, poised upon the net leading to the boat. “It’ll be okay. I promise.”
She reached up to take Scourgey by the paw.
Scourgey whined louder still.
“Let me,” said Longwell. Climbing back onto the netting, he scaled it fluidly, even in his armor. Reaching over the deck, he very gently coaxed Scourgey forward.
“I have you, Niamh,” he murmured softly, pulling the scourge onto his shoulders. “Shh. I have you.”
She relaxed. Draped over Longwell’s shoulders, she allowed him to descend with her upon him. Half coiled about his neck, she seemed to stare into his face with her dark eyes, all the way to the boat. There, Longwell released her; but she didn’t go far, taking up position by his heel and resting against him. He favored her with a grimace-like smile, then, when Jasen and Alixa had completed the company, took up a pair of oars.
Rowing toward the shore was slow. The oars seemed less to be moving water and more to be shifting debris. Even finding a gap in which to lower the oar for each stroke between broken wood and fabrics and—bodies—was a challenge.
The water grew shallow quickly, though. People were out here, wading and shouting, crying out for their loved ones. A young girl on her father’s shoulders was crying, pointing at the lumpen body of a tabby cat heaped on a board. Huanatha called out to him as they passed by, but the man gave only a blank, shell-shocked look before moving on, wordless.
They moved quietly. Huanatha, Kuura, and Longwell all exchanged murmurs. Jasen listened, but it was all speculation, wondering aloud what might have happened here.
When they were perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the shore—which, Jasen saw now, was an oozing wet clay, its reddish color leaking into the water like a dye—Alixa cried out. She dropped her oar—
Jasen was behind her. He scooted forward, trying to grab for it, but it went over the edge.
Huanatha turned. “What—?”
Longwell gripped her shoulder. “A body.”
Jasen saw it at the same time as Huanatha did. Alixa’s oar had dislodged debris in its sweep—and a body had floated up to the surface, no longer stuck under wooden boards and mangled metal framework. It came up face first … only what was left did not exactly resemble a face, anymore. The skin was almost entirely seared off. His, or her, eyes were gone, but what took their place were sunken, red raw patches of gore. The nose had been razed too—as had the full bottom jaw.
Jasen turned away, fighting the clench of his gut. No wonder Alixa had dropped her oar.
“It’s okay,” Longwell murmured to Alixa. “He is not in pain now.”
She refused to look out to the water or row. Cradling herself, she said in a whisper, “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Jasen leaned forward. He slung an arm arou
nd her momentarily. But with two rowers no longer rowing, their slow pace drew even nearer to a crawl, so after only that moment’s comfort, he took up his oar again and resumed its stroke, taking great care not to look at the seared visage that bobbed at the water’s surface as they left it behind them.
“What sort of event could level a city like this?” Kuura asked.
“A storm …” Longwell said, although it was plain on his face that he did not believe it.
“I have seen no storm before capable of gouging a hole in the earth,” said Huanatha. “Have you?”
“No.” Longwell shook his head. “I have not.”
Closer inland, Jasen began to recognize parts of boats. That curving panel of boards, that must have once comprised a hull. There was a crow’s nest, or at least part of it; it was still round, and still possessed a couple of the wooden beams that had once been its meager railing, although they were smashed in half. A captain’s wheel lolled atop the water beside the half-risen stone remains of whatever building had once been here. Fully whole, it looked almost comical among a sea of near indistinguishable wreckage.
Most of the survivors were spread out here. There were plenty upon the shore, but dozens and dozens fanned out into the waters. So many were shouting, crying … the cawing of carrion birds over their cries made the whole event seem like a feast for vultures, their voices joining one loud chorus.
Already, though, people were organizing. Small clusters had arranged themselves upon the shores, or close to them. They waded out in ones and twos, sifting through the detritus for bodies. However broken they were, however blackened, they pulled them from the water, dragged them back to land … and then they went out again, searching for the next.
Huanatha called out to an elderly man with a bent back. Skin the color of burnt sugar, he had been guiding someone else, another rescuer, out to something that had caught his attention a little too far for him to go.
He turned at the sound of Huanatha’s voice. His face was frail, as was the wispy white beard hanging down to his Adam’s apple.
He called something back to her, a question.
Huanatha responded.
A Home in the Hills Page 13