Do you really want to become me?
Better that than what the Father relegated me to, she said. But no, I’ll leave you well before I’m imprisoned in your poor flesh-sac.
And I’ll have it back, he said fiercely.
You still refuse to understand. Your connection to this body has been severed. If I cease sustaining it, you will leach into the void. It’s cold there.
Ahead, the night was giving way to dawn, a soft, pearly light revealing the devastation wrought by the storm. The body picked its way across a waterlogged field, passing carcasses piled at the western end against a low bluff. Cresting a hill, the vista was one of unrelieved destruction. Vegetation stripped of foliage, the ground churned as though trampled by a thousand oxen.
Down a gentle slope jogged the body, slowing to pick its careful way through a village.
I did a thorough job, Umu said, pride colouring her thoughts. My storm harvested thousands of untimely deaths. I am now stronger than my brother. Soon I will have no rival in all of heaven and earth.
Then why are you running?
Her answer was a mental squeeze that smeared his memories, giving him something akin to pain, coming near to snuffing him out. Careful, she said. You remain here only on sufferance.
Conal doubted that, doubted it very much. He could not imagine Umu, or her brother, suffering anything unnecessarily. His presence, he concluded, was somehow necessary to her possession of his body.
Worse comes to worst, he told himself, I’ll find a way to leave her here, trapped.
The body staggered and fell. It had been struck a blow to the head, one neither Conal nor Umu had seen coming. Umu’s thoughts faded for a moment, then snapped back into sharpness. She pushed the body back to its feet.
Sweat mingled with blood obscured his—her—one eye. A figure crouched before her, then, curiously, bowed to her. Conal watched as she raised the cudgel and took a lurching swipe at it. The figure seemed to dance backwards just far enough for the stick to flash over its shoulder.
He recognised the figure. Knew why he stood there. And definitely did not want Umu to know.
The first catechism of the Koinobia, he recited, is to serve the Most High with all one’s heart and soul. The second is to serve the First Men under the guidance of one’s superiors. With a furious concentration he began to run through the rest of the list.
The dark figure, clothed only in a light, knee-length jerkin, took a step forward and dealt three blows to Conal’s body. Two slaps to the face, followed by a kick that seemed to start from somewhere under the ground and finished in the sky, collecting his head along the way. Umu yelped as the body’s feet left the ground.
Conal kept reciting.
Who is this? she cried as she staggered backwards, trying to keep out of the range of the figure’s swift fists and feet.
The fifth is to spread knowledge of Hal’s redemptive sacrifice at every opportunity, he chanted, like he had ten thousand times before. A well-worn path: before every meal and again before retiring, the Twelve Catechisms needed to be repeated twelve times each. Empty the mind, narrow the focus, think of nothing else. Do not think of the name of the person assailing Umu.
The pressure increased on his tiny spark of life and memory, but he was gone into the catechisms now. Pain would not recall him. He’d abandoned the recitals during his journey with Stella, but now immersed himself in them as though they were the fluid of his mother’s womb.
“Lenares told me what you are,” the figure said to Umu. “Your blow did not kill her, though her wits are addled.”
A series of spins, twenty at least, fists flashing randomly to strike hard blows in the body’s ribs and sternum. Conal heard a rib crack, though the sound was distant, happening to someone else.
“Who are you?” said Conal’s mouth.
“You may have damaged Lenares’ mind,” the figure carried on relentlessly. “If so, I curse you for it. I defy you and your plans. With these blows I declare my enmity and that of all my kind.”
The figure struck from behind, the crack of hard-edged feet bruising, then breaking the body’s spine. It collapsed like a discarded rag doll.
Umu screamed in pain.
Conal continued his recital, ignoring her. The tenth is to seek knowledge of everything concerning the Most High and his plan for the First Men.
Magical power roiled within the body as Umu sought to repair the damage. The spine knitted itself back together, the discs fusing into one stiff rod. At the same time the attacker stomped on the body’s legs, breaking both with audible cracks, drawing further shrieks from the mouth.
“You have something of mine,” the figure said, scarcely breathing with effort. “I want it back.”
Conal’s body scrambled away, spidering backwards on its palms, dragging its useless legs behind it. Healing power poured into the broken bones and ruptured ligaments.
“I want back what is mine.”
The figure darted forward, curly hair matted in sweat, and slammed bare feet down on the newly healed legs, breaking them anew. It whirled, stabbing a kick that connected with Conal’s chin. The priest imagined he could feel the sickening snap of his body’s neck.
Umu’s scream was a constant thing, a high-pitched wail that broke through Conal’s recitation. Flames burned throughout the body and in places the skin caught alight. Umu spent every scrap of energy she could harvest on healing the damage.
Look how limited you are, locked in this prison of flesh and bone, Conal mocked. You can be defeated by a mere mortal.
Who is this? Umu cried, seizing on Conal’s return.
No harm in telling her now, or at least hinting at it. You took something of his as a trophy. You made him angry. You ought to give it back.
With an effort of pure will she made the battered body stand, then back away from her fierce assailant. She forced the mouth open: blood sprayed from it, and she spat out a chunk of tongue.
“You are Lenares’ plaything, the Omeran?” she made the mouth say, though Conal doubted if Torve understood. “You are a very brave man. Nevertheless, I think I will keep my trophy.”
The body turned and sprinted away, heedless of the damage it did itself.
The figure bowed his head and did not follow.
Exhausted, Moralye struggled to lift a fallen palm from their path. Noetos and his children, young and fit, had gone on some distance ahead, their anxiety overriding their concern for her. She took no offence; in her fifty years of life it had always been so.
Besides, she really ought to be paying the price for keeping her real age from her companions. A woman in her twenties, they all thought, not knowing how long-lived Dhaurians were. Despite Phemanderac’s near-century of life, despite the Domaz Skreud and its revelation of the preserving power of the Fountain, these outsiders assumed she was young and fit.
Neither young nor fit. Thirty years of service in the Hall of Scrolls had done nothing for her fitness, not that she was the sort of person to walk the steep tracks above the city, those favoured by lovers seeking privacy. No, Moralye was married to her scrolls. Everyone knew that.
Oh, she was pretty enough. One of the beauties of her clan, in fact, but her father and uncles had not been required to beat the boys away from her door. The outsiders, these friends of Phemanderac, thought all Dhaurians were bookish. But books and scholarship had long fallen from favour with Dhauria’s young people, and her interest in the past, imperfectly concealed, had made Moralye an object of derision. Her large, luminous eyes attracted particular ridicule. Hamapha, the boy she’d set those eyes on, had taken delight in telling her friends how suitable she was for work underground in the scholars’ cave. Soon they were all calling her “The Mole.” Moralye the Mole. Oh, it was all in fun, and she laughed along with them, but those eyes cried many bitter tears in private.
Her left hand slipped on the palm’s smooth trunk. She caught a splinter in the heel of her palm, then squealed as the trunk struck her foot, forcing a wor
d out of her lips that her mother would have rebuked her for. The palm tree finished exactly where it had been before she’d begun struggling with it.
A rustle in the undergrowth caught her attention. She had just begun to look up when a shape leapt over the tree trunk and landed beside her. A meaty hand slammed into her chest, thumping her to the ground and driving the wind out of her.
She was still wheezing when Noetos stepped over the palm tree. “Did he hurt you?” he asked, then, without waiting for a response, continued, “Where did he go?”
“I didn’t see,” she said, then added with a trace of asperity: “And I am fine, thank you.”
The big man reached down a hand and hauled her up. “Follow me. We need to catch that thing.”
Moralye nodded. Though always a little uncomfortable around the big red-haired Bhrudwan, fearing his unpredictability, she recognised the sense in his words. If she remained here she would soon be lost. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself after Noetos.
Within a few minutes they emerged on a low cliff a few metres above the coast. The man Lenares had said wasn’t Conal—although it was certainly Conal’s body—was nowhere in sight, evoking a series of salty curses from the fisherman. A noise behind them caused Noetos to set his hand to his sword, but the figures to emerge from the wreck of the coastal forest were those of his son and daughter, along with the southerner, Duon.
“Seen him?”
Arathé began signing and at the same time Duon spoke. “No, Fath—Noetos, no sign of him.”
Anomer came and stood beside his father, nodding to Moralye. “What is that?” he asked, pointing along the coast to his right.
Moralye felt the fisherman stiffen, his body turning rigid. “Alkuon,” he breathed. “Oh, Alkuon.”
With an inarticulate cry he hurled himself from the cliff, his body falling a frighteningly long way before landing, rolling and tumbling on the sand.
“Is it?” Anomer shouted down. “Is it the Conch?”
The words meant nothing to Moralye, but she recognised the urgency in them.
“Come on,” she said to Arathé. “I saw a less dangerous way down back in the village.”
The impromptu path was far more difficult than Moralye had thought, and she and Arathé arrived at the shipwreck some time after the others. The ship lay on its side, its back broken, the deck perpendicular to the beach. Waves lapped against the broken timbers, chasing each other through gaping holes into dark spaces. The whole wreck groaned as though teetering on some balance point.
A closer look at the surf revealed bodies bobbing up and down. Moralye loathed the sight: limbs floating at unnatural angles, mouths open, hair spread out like fans, eyes staring vacantly into the sky. Empty vessels, their owners gone. Death in Dhauria was a far more civilised affair, with violence almost unknown and virtually no natural hazards to upset the normal functioning of the city. Deaths happened—her own mother had died not two years previously—but they were confined to special hospices, associated with drawn curtains, perfumed rooms and whispering staff.
A roaring sound came from within the ship, the sound of someone enraged or in pain. Arathé and Anomer flung themselves forward into the surf, splashing their way towards the closest of the holes in the ship’s hull. Moralye followed, trying not to look at the corpses.
The hulk moved slightly, swaying with the waves, groaning as it did so. The morning sun vanished as she waded into the hole, ducking to avoid splintered timbers.
“Give me a hand!” Noetos called, his voice echoing in the cavernous spaces rendered by the storm.
Arathé and Moralye assisted each other across the interior wall of the hull, then one by one reached up to Duon’s proffered hand, who pulled them up to find their balance on an interior partition.
Smashed wreckage littered the hull: shattered timbers; cargo, both intact and broken open; the grotesque bodies of sailors. A piquant spicy scent helped mask what Moralye imagined would be a powerful stench, as many of the bodies appeared to be putrefying. The sailors would have endured a fearful death, she thought, down in the hull, trusting to their captain to deliver them.
Partition by partition the three of them climbed to the other side high above them—port or starboard; Moralye knew the terms but had no idea which it was—where Anomer awaited. The lightless void stretched away either side, broken occasionally by a faint ray of light where the sun penetrated through a damaged spot in the deck to their right. Eventually they reached the left side of the hull—the port side, she thought—and rested a moment. A hatch opened to the exterior, and Moralye gasped at the height they had attained. The beach was much too far below them for her comfort.
This is madness, she admitted. I should have remained behind to give Lenares the help I could. But Kannwar—she could never, not ever, even think that name with any degree of ease—had told her he would be sufficient. It had taken no more persuasion for her to leave the opening to Corata Pit and the Destroyer’s side. Yet she would be of little assistance here.
Ahead of her, Duon stood on the rail, balanced himself, and stepped carefully forward, making his way towards the platform upon which Noetos stood. Anomer followed close behind. Moralye was unsure of the architecture of such a large ship, having only been on small inshore boats, but she guessed the structure under Noetos’s feet was a cabin, and he stood on a wall. Duon offered Arathé his hand and the pair of them stood, clearly struggling for balance.
I’ve come far enough, Moralye decided. She perched on the rail, the beach below visible between the slats, and hoped it had not been weakened by the storm. Up here the ship’s gentle rocking motion was translated into an unsettling sway. The Dhaurian scholar found herself gripping tightly with both hands. Had her feet had fingers instead of toes, she would have thrown off her shoes and used them as well.
Noetos edged his way to the near end of the wall, lowered himself to his stomach and reached over. With a series of sharp raps he knocked on a door.
“Come out, Kidson,” he said. “I have an army here. It will go badly for you if we have to storm the cabin.”
A muffled voice shouted something Moralye couldn’t catch in response.
“No guarantees, no bargains,” Noetos replied. “Just the point of a sword if you try to hold us out.”
More indistinct shouting.
“I’ll behave better than you did. That boy died on the dock at Long Pike Mouth from the blow your man gave him. Come on, now; there are more important things on the wing than you and your stubbornness.”
This time Moralye heard the words, “I have a hostage.”
This gave Noetos pause.
In the silence, Moralye called out to the others: “Why won’t the man in the cabin come out?”
“We sailed on this ship not long ago,” said Anomer. “Captain Kidson treated us poorly, and dealt roughly with one of our party, who died. But my father’s chief complaint is that… er… ” He turned to his sister for support.
She signalled to him.
“Yes, my father fell in love with one of the crew and Kidson would not let her go.”
“You allow ships to have female crew?” Moralye said. “I am surprised. I have not seen many examples of such free-thinking in this land.”
“Not crew, exactly, no,” said Anomer, his face colouring.
“Quiet,” Noetos said.
Such directness always bemused Moralye, familiar with more sophisticated ways of phrasing such a request. The bluntness here in Bhrudwo was difficult not to take personally.
Noetos leaned closer to the door. “Who is your hostage?”
“You know who,” Kidson said. “You make a move to take me, she dies.”
“Let me speak to her.”
“Hard for her to speak with my sword in her mouth,” came the voice, faintly amused. “It’s all she can do to keep still. Don’t rock the ship overmuch as you leave, that’s my advice to you.”
Noetos cursed. “Just when magic would be most useful, our magicia
ns are not here. Arathé, could you bind Kidson for me, or aid me in some way?”
“She could,” Duon said, “but the effect would not be instantaneous. It is likely Cylene would die.”
Moralye wondered at that. She did not know who this Cylene was, nor why she was so important to Noetos and his family; and Duon speaking for Arathé seemed rather odd, especially since he gave the interpretation before she made the signals. But she thought of something else just then that took her mind away from signals and strange captives. Barely visible in the darkness just below the deck she had seen some serious damage to the timbers. She compared her memory to where she now stood, and hope rose. There might be another way into the cabin.
She eased herself backwards along the railing, away from Noetos’s frustrated mutterings, and down through the hatch. Yes, it was there, she hadn’t been imagining it: a darker patch among the shadowy recesses of what looked like accommodation of some sort. Other holes let in light through the deck; this hole must therefore issue into a place where the sun could not penetrate. The only such place she had seen on the deck was the cabin.
She ought to return to Noetos and report. He was the fighter, he had the sword; she was the one with common sense. A scholar, eyes suited to see things in dark places, not fit for boldness or battle. As she began to struggle upwards through the hatch, she could hear Hamapha’s genial, oh-so-reasonable laughter. She said another word her mother would never have approved of, shrugged her shoulders and let herself down into the darkness.
The hole lay some distance along the rightmost wall—what would, in the normal course of events, have been the room’s ceiling. Bunks, attached to the floor, now hung from the wall to her left. Bedding and clothes lay strewn on the floor—wall—below her. There seemed to be no way for her to reach the hole.
There was a lamp-holder though. At least, she assumed that was the function of the hook set in the ceiling—wall—just within arm’s reach. Without thinking about it she launched herself towards it, snatching at it with one hand. For a wild moment she thought she’d missed, and imagined herself thumping to the floor—wall—amid the sheets and blankets, but she made contact and her grip held. She swung forward, then back—this time, it has to be now—forward again and, extending her other arm, reached for the hole. Missed. Swung back, kicking back with her legs to generate speed. Reached again, getting a handful of splinters. Her breath whistling from burning lungs, she swung a third time, her right side rubbing along the wall, and this time her fingers found a firm grasp.
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