“Rain’s falling like the sky’s turned to water,” one man said. “I remember the storm of 1202, and this one’s already worse.” They spoke of widespread damage and injuries, and warned of devastation to come.
“They’re not safe inland,” Lenares said. “This storm wants to eat everyone up. If it can’t smash them it will drown them.”
“What do you want me to do, girl?” Kannwar asked, anger giving his voice a sinister edge. “Force them to join us?”
“Yes, exactly that,” she shouted at him. “Make them come to the pit. Keep them alive and slow the gods down.”
He reflected on this a moment. “You are a sentimental fool,” he said—which she was not; his words made her angry—but nodded to her anyway. Raising his voice effortlessly, his words boomed over the shriek of the wind: “Anyone we meet coming down this path is to be detained and compelled to accompany us to the assembly point at Corata Pit. This is by order of Andratan.”
“Your orders don’t apply to us, Destroyer!” Robal shouted.
Kannwar stopped in his tracks. “Whose land are you in?”
“Don’t know who owns this patch of dirt.” The guardsman lifted steely eyes to the tall man. “Maybe the Padouki, maybe Old Roudhos, maybe someone else. I’ll do as they ask.”
Stella put a hand on his arm. “Robal, this is a waste of our time.”
He shook her hand off, not noticing that his arm went right through her illusory forearm, nor her wince at the sight. “The only one wasting time is this snake, ordering us around.”
“Then do it because I ask you,” she said.
The man stood irresolute for a moment. Lenares could almost read his mind as his numbers flickered across his face: I should have gone with Sauxa and Kilfor. I want to kill the Destroyer. Why does Stella side with him? The thoughts were so clear she had no doubt the others could see them too.
The flaming red circle flared strongly in her mind, sparking dizziness and nausea. She clamped her lips together, trying not to vomit.
“Hurry,” she said hoarsely. “The hole is close now. Terrible things are coming.”
Robal glanced at her, his lip curling with disdain.
“Very well, my queen,” he said and, splattering mud everywhere, strode off to the front of the bedraggled group.
“The man is trouble,” Kannwar said. “Fortunately he has no power to do us harm.”
“If you think that, you don’t understand anything,” Stella snapped at him, and marched after her guard.
The world shrank to a grey nightmare. Conversation was impossible as the wind roared its anger at them. All around them young trees bent and old trees broke, their fall completely soundless in the maelstrom of noise. The few houses they could see close to the road had lost their roofs, and many had been levelled. The injured they gathered up into their swollen band of refugees; the dead they were forced to ignore.
And the dead became more common as the travellers pushed on, bent forward from the waist, into the storm’s heart. A young man lay splayed out on the path, his head split by a fallen branch, his once-fine clothes brown with mud. A tiny girl face down in a puddle complete with its own little wavelets, her body rocking in time with the wind gusts. A family ran towards the path, then were lost to view as the roof of a house slammed down on top of them.
Kannwar’s magic protected the travellers, keeping out the worst of the wind and debris, but even he could not shelter the hundreds of people following them. Lenares saw the rising anger in his eyes, the almost uncontrollable raging of his numbers. He was insulted, she saw, that there were powers stalking his land more potent than he.
A black column emerged from the grey swirl. Seren beckoned the others and stumbled towards it. The local who had been guiding them—much against his will—nodded, then turned and ran back down the path, pushing through the crowds following them. Kannwar did nothing to prevent him leaving.
The black column was an enormous tower of stone. Perhaps twenty paces across, it was hundreds of paces high, its apex lost in the cloud. Lenares could not discern its function, but there was a formed road beside it, leading down into darkness.
As she reached the road, a strange and frightening vista opened ahead of her. A vast pit stretched into the distance, its sides stepped like a giant staircase or circular arena—an enormous version of Talamaq’s Great Circus. The road, it seemed, wound around and around the pit, and Lenares set her weary feet to its rocky surface. As she dropped below the lip of the pit the storm lost much of its potency, and within minutes they could converse in relative comfort.
Seren, it seemed, had saved them all.
The storm is enormous, he said.
But heading south. The worst of it will miss us, she said.
An image of a vast, rotating pinwheel of cloud with a hole like an eye in the centre filled his mind. These storms are not predictable, he warned. It could turn our way. Even the outer reaches could make life very unpleasant for us.
Not as unpleasant as it was, she said, her mind-smile irrepressible.
Other people will be suffering.
How do you know so much about such storms?
He showed her his memories. You forget I am an explorer. I have seen storms like this in Crynon , where the inhabitants have learned how to survive, and in the Spear Lands, where because of the storms’ frequency no one makes their home. The wind comes from one direction, building in intensity until it destroys much in its path, then there is a lull as the central eye passes overhead. After that comes the worst as the wind reverses direction, breaking many structures that had merely bent before.
I have heard of these storms, but did not appreciate their power. How cruel of nature!
Such storms last for a day at the most before they move on, he said. Though some places can be unlucky: if the storm changes direction, it might reverse over an area it has previously visited.
Her mind filled with horror. Do these storms roam the world constantly? How many are there?
No, they are born and die, like all natural things. He tried not to think of his Emperor, dead now, who had sought to live forever, but she saw his thought and the pain it caused him. For some reason they are strongest over water, and die quickly when making landfall. They always come from the ocean: the Sea of Kahal and Oceana Obarasia are their breeding grounds.
Why have I never seen one?
Your mind is like a sponge, he said, laughing. There is never an end to what you want to know.
A good thing, she said, but her deeper thoughts turned to her years in Andratan. There were some things, it seemed, that were better left unknown. He saw her thought but did not comment on it.
You’ve not seen one because they seldom come this far north.
This one has.
Yes, he said. But you and I know this storm is not natural. It was bred out of season, and with it the hole in the world comes to destroy.
They stood together, the two remaining of Husk’s three spikes, and stared out over the forests and farmlands of southern Malayu. It had begun to rain, and though the wind was not strong, the air it blew was dank, somehow rotten, as though it had been trapped for centuries beneath the forest floor. High overhead, cloud had given way to dark scudding mist, while off to the east—their right—a blank curtain obscured the lower Padouk River and the Mala Gulf into which it drained. Behind that curtain lay a world open and vulnerable to the gods, one about to be damaged, perhaps destroyed.
What can we do? he asked.
She gave the question some thought. Like him, what she really wanted was to leave all this fear and conflict behind and go somewhere safe and quiet. But she knew that if the gods remained unchecked, soon few safe places would remain; islands of sanctuary surrounded by a storm surge of destruction.
Storm surge? That’s your idea. I’m not even sure what it means.
Our thoughts seem to be mixing together. I will withdraw.
No, she said carefully, something pulsing under her surface thought
s. We are far stronger together than apart. And now we have a potential, if unwilling, ally in Husk, we might well be able to do something to prevent the annihilation of the world.
Now it comes to it, he said. Are we willing to do to him that which we despised so much when he did it to us?
Yes, she said, without hesitation. Yes.
“This will be much easier,” Kannwar explained to the travellers. “Out in the storm we had to shape our shield around obstructions like trees and houses. Not only that, the area where the shield met the ground was vulnerable to the wind. Here, the sides of the pit will protect us. All we have to do is raise a streamlined bubble like a roof. The wind will slide across it, unable to gain purchase. As long as Stella and I have strength, we are safe.”
Lenares watched, fascinated, as Kannwar and Stella held hands and closed their eyes. Something invisible to normal sight pushed out from them. Lenares could sense a faint disturbance in the numbers swirling around her: a slight change in atmospheric pressure, followed by a reduction in the buffeting winds licking and cutting at them as the travellers wound their way down into the pit. The invisible something slipped over her like hot oil, and was lost to her senses.
Then began a battle unlike anything she had seen.
The grey clouds above them seemed to slow, then hover, and let loose a fusillade of hail. Those who had not yet passed through the invisible barrier were battered, forced to their knees by the power of the ice. Kannwar shouted a warning, and some of those struck by the ice staggered to their feet and stumbled forward; others crawled. But a few did not move.
The hail redoubled its intensity, crashing and clattering against the granite walls of the pit and sending chips of stone flying in all directions. As many people were maimed by the granite as by the hail, which now seemed to be the size of fists.
Kannwar and Stella’s canopy faltered under the assault. Lenares could see it now: a thin film spreading wider as the magicians attempted to encompass the width of Corata Pit, punctuated by countless indentations from the driving ice. A shriek from a woman not ten paces from Lenares sent people scurrying first towards, then away from a prone body. Lenares returned her glance skywards to see a hole in the canopy. Then another. This time the ice missed hitting anyone below, exploding on the path, sending people in all directions and raising a cry of dismay. A glance at the two magicians told her they were near the limits of their strength.
Despite the danger, Lenares could not contain her excitement. This was the stuff she had read about in the textbooks the young cosmographers were taught from, and in dusty old scrolls she’d found hidden in back rooms. Even Mahudia had not known some of the stories she’d found. The adventures of the wizards of Crynon were her favourites, though she also enjoyed the search for the floating island of Ilixa. Bolts of magic hurled in battle, acts of bravery celebrated, and the forces of evil always vanquished. Mahudia had laughed and said that the good people always won because they got to write the stories.
Lenares wondered whether she would end up as an evil witch in someone else’s story.
Stella cried out, and a hundred holes appeared in the canopy. A second later dozens of dull thuds were accompanied by grunts, cries and screams. One continued for a few moments, fading, to be suddenly cut off. Someone had been knocked from the path and had fallen into the pit.
“Why did you bring us here to die?” a woman wailed.
Lenares’ eye was drawn to Kannwar. The once-tall magician seemed to shrink, almost as though—no, exactly as though—he had become someone else. The flesh melted from his face, leaving a cracked and broken visage that made those near him cry out in fear. For a moment she feared the battle had damaged him or that his magic had eviscerated him, but then she looked more closely. I am seeing him as he really is.
He had abandoned his magical disguise, the mask that enabled him to move in the world of mortals, the better to focus all his energy on maintaining the barrier. He looked a thousand years dead.
Above her the canopy rippled and stretched tight, erasing the dents and holes. The sound of ice beating at the barrier filled her ears. Stella cried out again, this time in exaltation. The roar of ice carried on a moment longer, then ceased.
Hundreds of chests breathed out simultaneously.
The canopy had now stretched to cover the entire pit perhaps a quarter of the way below the rim. A few dozen stragglers remained outside the protective covering, but Lenares could see the effort required to maintain the barrier and realised the people outside were trapped with no hope of rescue. Its thin surface was about a hundred paces above them, though exact distances were hard to tell; the pit was so large that there was little apart from their own small figures to impart a sense of scale.
The hole in the world renewed its assault. Rain again began to fall, steadily but not the downpour of before. There was something different about this rain: each drop seemed to smoke as it struck the canopy. Stella and Kannwar grunted in pain. Lenares could not read what was happening, but a nameless dread began to steal over her.
This would be bad.
Tendrils of the storm formed themselves into vast gnarled hands and reached slowly down into the pit. Lenares had seen those hands before, on a beach south of here, as the gods had grappled with each other in an attempt to control her. Dozens of hooked claws began scrabbling at the canopy, scoring long grooves in the pale surface. The screeching drew dismayed gasps from those below. Films of liquid formed on the underside of the scratch marks, and drops of what to Lenares looked like blood began to patter down among the refugees.
Fearful shouts told her what she had already realised. This was not blood. Near her a little boy screamed thinly, a hand to his ruined face. As she watched, horrified, a second drop landed on his head. Bubbling and sighing, the boy slumped to the ground.
Drops began to hiss and splatter all around them. Lenares felt a burning sensation on her bare left arm; not a direct hit, a splash only, but the intense pain shocked her. When she pulled her arm up to see the damage, there was no mark. No evidence there had been any pain. Yet around her people lay cursing, screaming, writhing, begging, bleeding from dreadful burns.
What?
As the acidic water ate its way into the stone on which they stood, the granite path began to crumble.
“Stella!” Kannwar cried. “Give me more!”
The Falthan woman groaned, her already pale face shedding its remaining colour. Above them the dripping grooves began to close up. The pattering death slowed.
There was a howl of fury from beyond the canopy and the talons redoubled their efforts, scraping and punching at the barrier, searching, scouring.
Stella sank to one knee.
The howl of fury rose in volume and in pitch until it was a shriek. Lenares knew that voice well, knew exactly who uttered it. Umu.
The talons battered at the barrier a moment longer, then jerked away, turning their frustration on the rocks around the rim of the pit. The air above the canopy filled with percussive booms and flying shards.
Movement caught Lenares’ eye: the few remaining people trapped above the barrier, desperate to escape. Two of them tried to prise the canopy open, but could get no purchase on the smooth surface. Another hammered on the barrier. Her faint shouts could be heard in the silences between the crack and smack of rocks.
“No,” Lenares whispered. “Don’t make any noise. She’ll see you, and she’s angry.”
The talons paused, twitched a little as though searching for the source of the noise, then descended on the small group.
“Open the barrier!” The cry came from many voices, one of which was Stella’s.
“No. There is nothing we can do for them.”
The woman glanced up and stopped hammering on the canopy. A moment later she was seized and hoisted into the air. Other taloned hands scooped up the remaining trapped refugees.
Umu wants us to watch.
Each person was held up for display between the fingers of a clawed ha
nd, then, one at a time, deliberately pierced by the sharp thumb-claw as though they were worms on hooks. Those as yet unharmed screamed and wriggled, trying to escape, but none avoided their fate.
I should never have let her go, Lenares thought as she wept.
I am coming for you, Lenares. The god’s voice crashed into her mind. You will not die with the others. I have a special plan for you.
Lenares thought of the terrible last moments of Rouza and Palain. She did not want to give the Daughter ideas, but the images stubbornly refused to leave her head.
Your death will be worse, Umu promised.
The talons withdrew, their victims discarded to tumble to the canopy with a series of thumps. The cloud swirled, rose and melted away. Above the pit the sky turned blue. Below, the remaining refugees cheered. Stella sagged in relief.
Lenares did not. She knew it wasn’t over.
“Wait!” Kannwar cried. “This is the eye in the centre of the storm. Be strong now, for the storm’s worst moments still lie ahead of us.”
Groans and shouts of anger and derision followed this statement. But Lenares was not surprised. The gods had not finished with them yet, not by a long stretch.
“Hold,” said a voice.
Arathé turned to where a hulking figure stood, dripping wet, a slightly smaller figure beside him. “Father!”
“No,” the voice said, and though it was Noetos’s voice, to Duon it sounded subtly altered.
Careful, Arathé, a god speaks through him.
She gave mental assent to Duon’s warning, but ran over to her father nonetheless. “It is you! Where have you been? I’m sorry for attacking you, but—”
“But it was not you. I know. Just as I am not your father Noetos.”
Duon worked his way forward until he stood beside Arathé. “Which one are you then? Do you come to threaten or to bargain?”
“Neither. I come to warn you. Do not attempt to do what you plan.”
Beside him, the Padouki warrior stared impassively, a coiled spring.
Duon fought to keep his place. Everything about the fisherman seemed to intimidate: his voice, his demeanour, his eyes. Something about him had changed. It hurt just to be near him, as though he was some sort of heavy weight. The explorer licked his lips, then spoke. “Why? Are you frightened that we’ll succeed? Is that it?”
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