Sayri's Whisper: The Great Link Book 1

by Daniel J. Rothery

  Arad lay lifelessly across his knees, he, the monk, and Josel having fallen in the deep sand. Together they had picked him up; together they laid him down, then turned to meet their fate. Ahead, at the jungle’s edge, Sayri was on her knees, and the taller, robed girl had fallen beside her. They would all die together. He hoped they would all welcome it, as he did.

  The Lower Valley girl reached out her hands, and something flashed out from her, a sort of transparent wave, faster than the liquid rock. Somehow it seemed faster than thought. It drove a wedge into the onrushing wave, and parted it, and the liquid fire exploded past them on either side.

  Gallord-Smit’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes went wide. The blazing inferno raced past them—he could feel the scorching heat radiating an arms-breadth away—and onto the beach behind them, then into the sea where a blast of steam leapt from it, shrouding the entry point in hot, white cloud.

  He looked back at Sayri in wonder; she was still seated, her hands before her, and the fire was roaring by in a perfect wedge. Sweat poured from her hairline; all of them were sticky in the sudden steam bath. It was madness.

  Beside him, Josel dropped to his knees, his mouth equally agape. The other Lordslander—the one Josel had called a monk—was seated cross-legged, his head bowed as if meditating. Before him, the hunched-over man was curled into a ball, as a sleeping dog might be before his master.

  “I can’t—I can’t do this,” Sayri said suddenly. “They’re dying!”

  Her companion leapt to her feet. Gallord-Smit saw now that she was in a Collector’s robe. “What? Sayri, what do you mean?”

  “They’re dying,” Sayri repeated. “It’s too hot.”

  The Collector turned back to the monk. “Proselyte! You must help her.” The man was from the Sanctuary of the Spirit? Gallord-Smit struggled to keep up, to understand what was happening.

  The Proselyte lifted and then shook his head from his seated position. “I cannot help her, Wissa,” he said. “I can not channel the Link as she can.”

  Gallord-Smit limped forward, his leg blazing from the open wound he had struck in falling. “What are you talking about? What—what is she doing? What—” He shut his mouth as he realized that he had no idea what he was talking about, or even what he was asking.

  “They’re dying!” Sayri said again, her words nearly a wail now. “Proselyte, what do I do?” Her hands were still outstretched, and she seemed to be caressing the air before her, but Gallord-Smit saw nothing there but the two walls of fire pouring past her to either side.

  “Who is dying?” the Proselyte asked, standing with some effort in the thick sand and climbing up behind her, his voice oddly calm. To Gallord-Smit’s ears he almost sounded frustrated.

  “The—the swarm!” Sayri exclaimed, her voice now shrill with panic. “The fire is too hot! It’s killing them! Please, Proselyte, you must help me!”

  “Swarm? I do not—” the monk started, but the taller girl had placed her hand upon his shoulder.

  She leaned in to him, and from beneath her hood, amidst the roar of the molten rock flowing past them, Gallord-Smit could just make out the words. “If you do not try, we will die,” she said.

  The Proselyte his hands on Sayri’s shoulders, and lowered his head in concentration.

  After a moment, Sayri shook her head violently, her voice desperate. “No, its not working. Concentrate harder! It’s going to fail!”

  Gallord-Smit sighed. Well, he didn’t know what was going on, but it looked like they were going to die after all. Oddly, the situation seemed almost . . . humorous to him. Was he so detached, so ready to die after all?

  Josel stepped past him. “Can ya cool it?” He asked Sayri, standing behind her.

  “What—what do you mean?” Sayri cried. She sounded in tears.

  “It is liquid rock,” Josel told her quickly. “If ya cool it into an arch—”

  “He’s right!” the Proselyte burst in. Then, more calmly, as if finding his lost composure, “It will turn to rock, child. Cool it, quickly.”

  “I’ll . . . try,” Sayri said, but Gallord-Smit already could see the effect; the two wedges of fire before her were darkening. As he watched, they became dark red, then black with only cracks of red glowing through. Then it turned black entirely. The temperature of the air around them had already been hot, but now it rose to stifling, almost like inside an oven.

  “It’s working!” Josel exclaimed.

  Sayri continued to focus intently for another hundred heartbeats while the others watched on anxiously. When she lowered her arms and stood up, letting out a great sigh, Gallord-Smit looked around them in wonder. A great glossy black wall, perhaps half again his height, formed a perfect semicircle around them stretching into a teardrop toward the sea. Beyond he could hear the liquid rock still grinding past, and behind them it continued to plunge into the water, sending up great plumes of steam.

  They were safe, for the time being. All looked around them in wonder, and then one by one their eyes fell upon Sayri, who was slumped kneeling, her skin slick with sweat.

  “Does someone want to explain to me what just happened?” Gallord-Smit asked, the words not quite sounding like a command.

  ・

  Sayri went to Arad. They had dropped him on the beach, halfway to the sea. She fell to her knees in the sand, and wrapped her arms around his head and shoulders, rolling him into her lap.

  His breaths were short and laboured; perhaps from the heat that had them all gasping, perhaps not. He looked so peaceful, and so innocent. She wanted nothing but to protect him; when he was well, she vowed, she would never let this happen again. He would be healthy and happy, and they would live out long lives together. These troubles would be over. With the Link, she would see to that.

  She kissed his forehead.

  Heal him! she commanded the Link.

  That person is not protected by wise means, she thought. A colony must be established.

  “What?” she asked out loud.

  There was no reply.

  Panic rose in her. HEAL HIM, she commanded again, screaming the words inside her mind.

  That person is not protected by wise means, she repeated to herself. A colony must be established.

  “What does that mean?” she demanded out loud. “Can you or not?”

  The Voice did not answer. The others turned to look at her, frowning their concern.

  The Link could not heal him? Or—would not?

  “Please,” she begged, “don’t let him die. Please.” Take me if you must. Please, heal him.

  That person is not protected by wise means. A colony must be established.

  “No,” Sayri cried, slumping. “No.” Her head fell to Arad’s, and her tears rolled from her cheeks across his forehead.

  52 JODHRIK

  They all sat there for a long time, Sayri holding Arad and crying and begging him to wake up while the others waited for the liquid rock to cool. It had stopped pouring down past them after a short time, but the mounds that had flowed beyond the girl’s impossible barriers to the sea remained red hot and glowing angrily.

  The mountain stopped grumbling and the smoke began to thin; as it spread out, it gradually shifted in colour from black to grey and began to resemble normal clouds. At some point, morning became afternoon. All the while Sayri remained focused entirely on Arad. Occasionally she cried and begged someone to heal him, but did not seem to be directing the request at anyone. The boy remained unconscious.

  Wissa tried to give Sayri food and drink, but she ignored it. Jodhrik didn’t eat either, but sat quietly in meditation waiting for the girl to ask of him what she needed. Bauma remained quiet as well, after he stopped whimpering. Jodhrik had never seem him so frightened, not even when he was hurled through the air like a toy by the girl’s unimaginable mastery of the Great Link.

  The others relieved their hunger, and Gallord-Smit and Josel were discussing if they should dig a latrine when it started raining. It came down in huge droplets
at first, forming grey pools in lower pockets of the sand. Quickly it changed to a downpour.

  After a few thousand heartbeats of continuous rain, Josel pointed out that raindrops on the blackened flows of rock had ceased sizzling, and suggested that it might have cooled enough to walk on. It had, Jodhrik noticed, been polished a clean and shiny black. The Somrian went over to the nearest flow and held his hand near it, then tapped his hand on it briefly and pulled it away. Finally, he laid his hand against the smooth rock and held it there for a moment.

  “Still hot, but reasonably safe,” he pronounced, taking his hand away. “Other areas might be hotter.” He climbed cautiously atop the mound, and looked out beyond the curved black wall. “The rock does na cover everything,” he told them, “and the beach is clear over there, less than na hundred paces. Even if very hot, we can run off in na boots.”

  “Do you see anyone else?” Gallord-Smit asked from where he sat. He seemed reluctant to stand and look for himself.

  “No,” the Somrian commander replied immediately. “There many other flows like this one. Everything smoking.”

  A bird’s cry sounded, and a gull flew in and landed on the upper edge of Sayri’s black wall, peering at them. Jodhrik wondered if it had found the only cool place on the island. He suddenly realized that he could hear many of the birds crying out over the sea, perhaps in chagrin at having no places to land.

  The Front-Captain stood with a grunt, then limped over to the rock flow and climbed it with difficulty, looking east. “Hellamer’s rock is still there,” he said thoughtfully. “I can see it in the distance. He could have survived.” He glanced back at the group, considering, then appeared to come to a decision. “The ship was going to rendezvous there. I need to hike over, make sure they don’t miss us.”

  “What ship?” Josel asked him, raising an eyebrow.

  Gallord-Smit chuckled. “One of yours, probably. Some of my people had plans to take one, and pick up my friend over there. He is an officer, the Captain ruling the large island.”

  The Somrian commander nodded slowly, ignoring the fact that the Captain no longer held that island under his control. “They might also fail, and ask for my men ta rescue him. I should join ya, in case na Somrian master still commands.”

  It was not a question, but Gallord-Smit considered, then agreed. “Fair enough. If we agree this battle is over?” He put out his arm.

  Josel pursed his lips, his eyes flicking to Arad and back back briefly. “Over,” he said, taking the arm.

  “Wissa, go with them,” Sayri said suddenly, looking up from where Arad’s head lay in her lap.

  “Why?” Wissa demanded, standing to look down at her. “I should remain with you.”

  “If it’s our ship they found, they will follow your commands,” Sayri pointed out.

  “Or the Front-Captain’s,” the taller girl countered. “It was a Lord’s Lands vessel.”

  “We can’t be sure they’ll obey him. Wissa . . . just go. Please. And take them with you,” she added, gesturing at the Proselyte and his bestial companion. Her eyes glistening as if the dispute might cause her to burst into tears again, and he felt for her.

  “Young lady, we cannot simply leave you—” Jodhrik began, but Gallord-Smit interrupted.

  “We may be gone for some time,” he said. “Perhaps a day or more.”

  “I know,” Sayri said, her head swinging back down to Arad. “I know.”

  The Front-Captain paused a long moment, then he motioned to Wissa and the Proselyte. “Come on,” he said, his words authoritative. “Leave them be.”

  Wissa shook her head again, looking back at Sayri, who just stared at her. Finally she sighed and climbed up on the rock flow, though she looked back repeatedly in case Sayri had more to say.

  Jodhrik scowled for just as long, but followed Wissa onto the rock. He did want to leave the girl alone either, but she was safe enough here—there was probably no other living soul on the island. She also wanted time with the boy, who clearly was the one she had been seeking, and who just as unmistakably would soon be returning to the Great Link.

  He was giving her time to say goodbye. They all were.

  As he began to move off the beast-man stood there, grunting at the liquid fire turned solid, hesitant to touch it. Then he looked over at Sayri, with whom he was now alone in the strange sandy grotto, and a trace of panic crossed his savage face—perhaps he recalled flying through the air at her whim—and he finally scrambled up the smooth rock after the rest.

  The sky was a featureless, solid grey. Rain was still drizzling down in small, scattered droplets. From the top of the hardened rock, Jodhrik looked out upon a bizarre, alien wasteland. At the mountain’s summit he could see a gentle, smooth slope striped with vertical lines—the rivers of molten rock that had already partially hardened. Still glowing a muted orange in some places, they ran down the slope to its base then continued out across the flat jungle, transforming it into a steaming, rippled black-and-red plain. Here and there he could see trees still standing where the liquid fire had passed them by, but nearly all were on fire, so that Jodhrik’s view was of rock flow, then smoke, then rock flow, and so on. There was no longer a mountain, a jungle and a beach—the island was now a complete sculpture, formed by the hand of the volcano.

  It was an eerily stunning sight, and one that at once gripped Jodhrik’s heart with fear and touched it with awe of nature’s pure beauty. The Great Link had played out one of its most extraordinary acts here on this day, and he felt honoured to have been chosen to be present.

  Not the only one, however. Ahead of him, the two commanders—plotting enemies until only a short time ago, now apparently allies—trudged out over the bleak terrain. The Front-Captain, limping badly, was gesturing toward an irregular outcropping of rock that extended into the sea; supposedly that was where his friend awaited pickup, and where they could expect to be rescued.

  Behind them trod Sayri’s enigmatic protector Wissa, who defiantly wore a Collector’s robes. Jodhrik had no doubt that if she deemed it necessary, the tall, broad-shouldered girl would continue to do so back in Benn’s Harbour, Spire of Rising be damned. He wondered at her motivation for doing so, but politics was not the concern of a Proselyte.

  At his side lumbered the beast-man Bauma, who had become bonded to him in an odd leader-follower dynamic often coloured by a trace of sadomasochism—though which of them was the tortured, and which the torturer, was unclear. Recent events had left the savage so threaded with fear that he clung to the Proselyte as a child would to its mother. It was a bizarre relationship he had found himself thrown into.

  They climbed across the folds of rock gingerly at first, taking care for particularly hot spots that could set their boots on fire or worse—soft pockets where their feet might sink in, meaning the loss of a foot. Soon, however, they concluded that the lava had cooled enough to be safe, and picked up the pace.

  The flow that had engulfed their tiny capsule of safety—as improbable as it was—was no more than a hundred paces wide or so, but the strip of beach they found beyond it was short-lived. Another flow, much wider, had arrived at the sea only a few hundred paces further on. Josel gingerly tested the surface of this flow as he had the last and declared it safe; it seemed to have come down prior to the one that nearly consumed them, or had cooled faster for some reason. They climbed up the smooth slope, the slippery-looking rock nonetheless affording fair purchase, and began to make their way across it. The flow had curved as it made its way down to the sea, leaving a stretch of jungle only a few hundred paces inland. It did not, however, appear more traversable than going over the flow, since it was all smoking and some was still lit with smouldering flame.

  A few hundred heartbeats of hiking across the freshly formed rocky plain and they came upon the corpse.

  Or, at least, part of a corpse; they could only conclude that the rest lay within the rock. It was a leg, rising from the rock at an angle that pointed toward the sea, the body completely ent
ombed within the flow from the hip up. Bizarrely, only the upper thigh area appeared to be scorched at all; the rest of the leg that protruded skyward appeared undamaged. There was a smell of cooked meat; Jodhrik was disgusted with himself when he felt his stomach growl.

  “One of yours,” Josel said, his lips pursed as they examined the corpse.

  “Yes,” Gallord-Smit agreed glumly. The leg was covered in leather pant, and there was no sign of a skirt. “He can’t have been alone,” he added, studying the surrounding barren landscape and frowning as he found nothing else.

  “Incredible,” Wissa said expectedly. Jodhrik went over to where she had squatted down, an armswidth from where the leg emerged. His eyes slowly widened at what he saw.

  There, in the stone, was the crown of a helmet, with part of a cheek guard showing. Beneath that, the side of a face. It was burned the colour of the stone it lay immersed in.

  Jodhrik shook his head slowly in wonder. “How could the flesh had survived the heat of that . . . inferno?”

  “Who can say,” Wissa muttered in reply, her tone expressing the same emotion he felt. “It must have been quick.”

  Jodhrik shivered. What a horrific death—and they had only narrowly avoided the same, thanks to the Lower Valley girl’s unbelievable power. He straightened solemnly while he considered the ramifications of what he had learned. The girl was proof of the presence of the Great Link, and its immense power! If such talent could be taught to others—

  No, he reproached himself. The Sanctuary does not seek power. And the Great Link must be used for the betterment of all, not for the interests of a few.

  And yet, the way in which Sayri wielded the Link—it was indisputably power. Many would see only that. Many would consider her a grave threat.

  Again he found himself pondering the robes that Wissa wore; cautiously examining them. Were the Collectors seeking the girl? Had Wissa seized it from a dead Collector, as some sort of trophy?

  If the Spire of Rising was after the girl, there was no doubt of their intent. There would also be no doubt of the grave danger that Sayri would be in if she returned to the Lord’s Lands.