‘What do you want to know?’ said Totelun. ‘What are the questions?’
Naus smiled to himself. He’d been longing to discuss this with someone for weeks now, ever since they had arrived in Theris and no longer been able to. It was a detour that certainly demonstrated the problem with some immediacy, but had only really resulted in delaying and endangering them. The only positive he could see was saving the Empress.
‘There are questions like there are stars in the night sky. For example, where are the Overlords now? We know, or at least I know, the legends of their ancient battles. I was there for much of it. The legend goes that they were defeated, so why does Velella’s prophecy talk about them like they still exist.’
‘Maybe it’s just their power that remains. Waiting around for someone to claim it. Like Abrax or Harling.’
Naus nodded. ‘Or Noctiluca. It’s as good a theory as any.’ He brushed his hand in the water, feeling the chill on his fingers. ‘There’s always been the possibility they weren’t defeated. I never saw them die.’
‘What did you see?’
‘What a wonderful story that would be to tell again. But not now. I promise I will tell you another time. Suffice to say I saw their cities fall, and I saw the power they wielded die. It was like the peace after a storm, Totelun. It was unmistakable. But I did not see the bodies.’
Totelun continued to row and the city crept further and further away. The soft splash of his oars as they met the water and were wrenched back was the only sound. Naus peered out over Totelun’s shoulder, gauging how far they still had yet to go; they had travelled far to make sure Cassandra would be safe. His eyes slowly became more adjusted to the dark and he caught blue lights on the banks on both sides. As the foliage that had hidden them fell away to scrubland and fields, it revealed swarms of Medusi. Just floating with the cool breeze, the Medusi hadn’t sensed them in the darkness out on the water. There were a few thousand at least, a bloom that a year ago would have been the largest he’d seen in decades.
‘What are they doing?’ said Totelun. He had seen them too.
‘Just waiting.’
‘Waiting?’ A few floated lazily over the river, their tentacles brushing the water and making gentle ripples. The bioluminescent glow outshone the moon. Their pace slowed dramatically as Totelun meandered wide around the ones out on the water.
‘For when their goddess chooses a new destination,’ Naus guessed. ‘She is consolidating Theris now. But soon she will have a new target. Ambition like that will not be satisfied with Theris alone.’
‘Why are they so far out?’ There was a rising panic to Totelun’s voice.
‘They must be allowed to roam free in the Theris basin. Until she needs them.’ He knew what Totelun was thinking before he said it.
‘Cassandra! You left her out here! Alone.’
‘We gain nothing through fear or arguing. She will be fine. Just keep going, and we will see her soon enough.’
He hoped his words were sufficient, but he felt Totelun quicken the pace, the splashes of the oars growing more frequent. The Medusi slid by, but there were always more.
‘What else?’ said Totelun, testily. ‘Take my mind off them, what other questions?’
A moment ago, he’d claimed there were hundreds, but now only one came to mind. ‘Well, how do you destroy the Medusi? It seems like a mammoth task. Do we have to individually kill every last one of them? I mean, they breed too fast to even contemplate it. Do we have to shoot down every single Celestial? There are over forty of them alone, each one named by the Medologers. Do we have to kill every last thralled person on Arceth?’
‘That I can’t do,’ said Totelun.
‘You’ll have to if that’s the only way. We can’t let Noctiluca win. She will just carry on; the Order want to thrall the world. I heard their sermons.’
‘I won’t kill Chrysaora, nor Cassandra.’
Naus didn’t repeat it, but he thought it. We may have to. ‘Maybe that’s one for another time,’ he said, then thought of another. ‘And who is Noctiluca?’
‘What do you mean who is she?’ said Totelun. ‘She’s the Medousa.’
‘She didn’t wake up one day the Goddess of a cult of slavers. She had to get there. She had a life prior to the Order.’
‘Okay, but how would you find out?’
‘And did she just walk in off the street recently, and take over, install herself as their queen?’
‘If she had the power of the Overlords, she could do that. You felt her voice.’
‘True. But there’s another option. Did she start the whole thing, from the very beginning? Did she create the Order around herself?’
‘Again,’ said Totelun, ‘all she’d need is her trick. Something to fool them. And she has the power to speak into people’s minds. Gathering followers would be easy for her. She might already have the Overlord’s magic.’
Naus thought of the voice that had made him lose all control of his faculties, the strange spell he’d been under in the palace. He’d been about to just announce himself to her, against his better judgement. He’d been about to voluntarily kill himself. Eventually he said, ‘I thought the Order was run by a cadre of Clerics, not a thralled witch. If she started the cult, it would make her over four hundred years old, but it’s possible.’ I am living proof it can happen, he thought. ‘How is she immortal? I have never met another.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Totelun, flippantly. ‘Why are you immortal?’
‘What?’ Naus was taken aback,
‘Well, seeing as we are just asking questions, how come you are a thousand years old and not in the ground feeding the worms?’ He should have suspected Totelun would ask his own questions. ‘You kept your age a secret for some time, but you walked the surface world back when the Overlords did. How?’
‘I don’t know, damn it. I wish I did. I have lived over a thousand years, and each day I awake I am still alive. It is a curse.’
‘A curse?’ Naus could see Totelun’s incredulous face in the reflected moonlight.
‘Yes, a curse. To see cities rise and fall. To see that which you helped build become rubble. To love, and to watch those you love grow old and die. To watch your successes and failures both turn to dust. I eventually had to become a nomad, my unnaturally long life made me a target wherever I stayed. Exist as an old man for more than fifty years, and folk start to get mighty suspicious. So I stayed on the move.’
‘You must know why,’ said Totelun. ‘Are you actually cursed?’
‘Maybe?’
‘What do you mean maybe?’
‘I mean I don’t know. My memory has not lasted as well as my body. If I knew the answer once, I have forgotten it.’
‘You have forgotten the secret of immortality?’
Naus smiled. ‘Yes I appreciate how it sounds.’
‘Can you be hurt?’ Totelun asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Can you be killed?’
‘Why, are you planning to kill me?’
‘No, but there was another thing I wanted to ask you.’
‘You may as well ask it. You’re most of the way there.’
‘When we fought together before, I saw your robe dislodged.’
Naus gasped in mock disbelief. ‘You shouldn’t have been looking under an old man’s robe.’
‘I’m not joking,’ said Totelun. Naus could see his eyes, intense in the moonlight. ‘You have three ragged scars on your back, near the top of your spine.’ He let it hang in the air, seeing if Naus would take the bait. ‘We both know how you got them.’
‘You know, do you?’
‘Yes, they are Medusi scars. And you said there was no way to become unthralled. Just a minute ago you said we might have to kill all the thralled. Even Harling thinks there is a way to do it, but wouldn’t tell me how. I think you have been through it, Naus, I think you have been unthralled three times. Now what’s the story there?’
Naus sighed. He owed Totelun
a lot and had resolved not to keep any more secrets from him. ‘No, what I said was, there is a way to unthrall someone, but you wouldn't like it.’
‘How do you do it?’
‘You remember in the mansion, we killed the creature that had been thralled by a dozen common Medusi?’
Totelun just waited for him to continue.
‘When he died, the Medusi dislodged their thralling tentacles, and came after us instead. There was no life left to drain from a corpse.’ Naus left that to hang.
‘You have to die?’ Totelun guessed.
‘Yes, you have to die. Then the Medusi disconnects of its own accord.’
‘Die? You died?’
‘Yes, three times.’
‘Die?’
‘Yes, die. So mortals can’t do it. Now do you understand why I didn’t tell you? Because it doesn’t help.’
Naus tried to calm himself, but Totelun’s question had got under his skin. If he was honest with himself, the whole conversation irked him, revealing as it did, how little they knew and how ill prepared they were for the task they had set themselves.
He let the conversation lapse, instead brooding on where he could look for information. There were options, clear ways to go about it. He had attempted some of them before, but been convincingly rebuffed by the Order of the Medousa.
It all came back to knowledge. They couldn’t fight without it. They would die without it, and it was his responsibility to equip the boy who fell from the sky with what he needed to succeed.
He decided to try again. The soft lapping of the water meant Totelun had calmed.
‘Do you see what I mean? There is too much we don’t know for certain.’
‘It would be nice to know all those things, but I don’t see how any of them help us defeat her, or the Medusi.’
‘When you hunt an animal, it helps to know it’s weakness. If we find out who she is, we may be able to find something to exploit. If we knew how their magic worked, we might find a way to counter it. Overlords, if we knew how the crystal was significant, maybe that would help.’
‘None of it really sits on rock though, does it?’
Naus had never heard the expression, but Totelun’s meaning was clear; they didn’t have a solid foundation. Everything was maybe that and maybe this. He thought of the voice again, the voice of the Goddess, that had so easily taken him. ‘What about her power?’ he asked. ‘What is that?’
‘It made you want to go to her,’ said Totelun.
‘I have trouble remembering exactly what I was thinking at the time.’
‘You weren’t thinking. It was like you were being controlled.’
Naus nodded absently.
‘And how do we fight it?’ added Totelun, after a moment. ‘How do you kill something that can take control of you before you can even get close?’
Naus had no answer. It seemed impossible. Although, the boy hadn’t been as affected. ‘You punched me.’
‘I’m sorry, I just…’
‘No, it’s fine. What I mean is, why was I affected and you weren’t? Why are you immune?’
Totelun didn’t answer immediately, but when he did his story was intriguing. ‘A few years ago, I went hunting with my father. We tracked a creature called a Trelki, a kind of eel that lives in a unique type of tree. It sings a hypnotic song that lulls you into a kind of waking sleep. In that state you are helpless; you walk towards the creature and offer it your neck. My father was affected, dropped his bow on the ground and shambled towards the creature. I was not. I cut it down and the moment I did the spell was lifted.’
An interesting story. Naus was not one to believe any old street peddler with claims of powers; they were always charlatans looking to make a handful of gold. And there were plenty of those blinded by a coincidence or two into believing they had an ability they didn’t.
But he’d also seen too much in the world that was real. He’d seen those who had power given to them by the Medusi; the navigator on Shandan Cane’s ship made his living legitimately; Chrysaora had reached inside Totelun’s belly with her powers and wrung his stomach out; Naus himself had felt the pull on his mind from Noctiluca’s magic. Who was he to say Totelun didn’t have some kind of resistance? Maybe that’s why he was the one the prophecy spoke of?
‘So you suspect you may be immune to hypnosis. And therefore immune to her magic, whatever it is.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’d like to test it, but the hypnotists in most towns are swindlers and con artists. They couldn’t hypnotise a chicken, let alone another human.’
‘You have the proof you need already,’ said Totelun, grouchily. ‘I killed the Trelki and saved my father. I stopped you going into that throne room and damning us both.’
He hated to admit it, but the boy was right.
‘Alright. There is a place where we might find some answers,’ he said, finally trying to broach the idea he’d been dancing around the whole journey. ‘The Temple of the Order lies in the heart of Terracon, nestled in a mountain cleft in the middle of the steppe. I have never been able to infiltrate it. I once impersonated an acolyte, but I didn’t even make it to the torture you spoke of. And that was long before Harling’s time.
‘We have an opportunity, Totelun. Now, while they Order are in Theris. We could go there, break in. Find the histories of the Order. We could answer some of these questions.’
If Naus had expected excitement, he didn’t get it. ‘But I have to find a way home,’ said Totelun.
‘Oh, not this again.’
‘What, I should just give up? After all this?’
‘No, but we know there are more important things to do. You accepted the prophecy, even the Order believe you are the one Velella foretold.’
‘Until we have more information there’s no reason for me to give up searching for a way back there.’
Naus was frantic suddenly. Was he really getting a refusal? ‘We’ll keep our eyes open and our ears to the ground, something will turn up on the way maybe?’
Totelun turned away, concentrating on his rowing. Eventually, he spoke. ‘I wanted to tell you this right from the beginning, but you were too busy telling me about your plans, and your questions. What about what I want?’
‘You sound like a child,’ Naus scoffed.
‘Well maybe I do. While I was in that cell waiting for you, I had a cellmate. He was from the Floating Islands, Naus. Another like me, from a tribe near mine. That means there is a way back.
‘No, it doesn’t. It just means…I don’t know what it means.’
Totelun didn’t answer.
‘Why do I get the sense there’s something you’re not telling me?’ Naus added.
They fell into a heavy silence that was difficult to break. Somehow Naus had assumed that Totelun would continue to follow him always, to the Temple of the Order and beyond until they had destroyed the Medusi together. It had been their destiny surely. But it seemed in less than two weeks apart he had forgotten that the boy was the most stubborn person he had met in perhaps six centuries. No, possibly more. Only Eleutheria could challenge him for the mantle.
He shouldn’t be surprised. He’d lost the ability to remember things in detail hundreds of years ago. He couldn’t remember any of his early life before Eleutheria, he couldn’t remember his own parents or where he came from. He may have doubted his short-term memory many thousands of times, but he couldn’t be sure. It was a downward spiral; mainly all he remembered of those old times with Eleutheria were the ones he had recounted again and again as a travelling bard, paying his way with stories his audience took for legends.
In the bleak night sky they’d fled under, there’d been no sign of the Floating Islands hanging in the sky above, but now, as the embrace of night gave way to the dawn, Totelun couldn’t stop looking up at them.
Naus could sense a burgeoning panic in him, a need to speak. Totelun was a warrior, brought up to act not talk. But he clearly needed to say something. Naus waited, letting
Totelun broach whatever it was in his own time.
‘Do you see the Islands,’ said Totelun. ‘Do you see how they’re arranged?’
Naus looked. The Floating Islands were a strange sight. Most people paid them no mind, so used to the sight were they, but when you actually looked at them, they were strange. The undersides were like broken and warped bowls, carved right out of the earth and then lifted into the sky. In the version of the story he told, it had been done by one of the Overlords during a battle. They hung quite close overhead, maybe further into Terracon than the Theris valley at that moment. But they had been on the far side of Terracon when Totelun had fallen from the sky. ‘They’re just there, Totelun. There’s no pattern.’
‘But they drift, right? With the wind. What was the word you used?’
‘Migratory, like the Celestials.’
‘Yes. They follow the wind currents, floating over different nations and kingdoms.’
Naus nodded.
‘My cellmate told me that every three to four years they converge on the mountain at the apex of the Theris Valley.’
‘Mount Cartracia,’ said Naus. It wasn’t hard to see how that could be believed. The Islands had migrated from the east over four months or so, and now were only a few hundred miles from the mountain. How long would it take them to look like they brushed the top; maybe three weeks? ‘And let me guess, that’s how he got here. Stepped off an island right onto the top of the mountain.’
‘I guess.’
‘You guess? You’re still not telling me something. I thought we trusted each other. The shit we’ve been through.’
Totelun looked abashed in the grey morning light. ‘We do,’ he said. ‘I just know what you’re going to say.’
‘Try me.’
‘The guy tried to kill me.’
‘Your cellmate?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘He had a knife.’
‘And?’
‘And after a quick struggle, I had a knife. I was forced to kill him.’
‘Do you know why he wanted to kill you?’
‘Not for certain, but he was a Shaman’s apprentice, and was screaming the name of his master. The Shaman Lord of the Islands, Sorkhanis.’ Totelun stopped and looked at him, wearing that expression that he wore when he went into battle. A challenge. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’
Embrace of the Medusi (The Overlords Trilogy Book 2) Page 17