Isolating and imposing, the wilderness continued to unsettle her, with the ice wind blustering into her. She could have been on another world entirely. For so long, all she had known was the chaotic clamour from the auditorium, screams of the crowd, girls cackling at her in the changing rooms, the animals screeching . . . And now the only sound was that of the horse doing her best to plough across the long-forgotten roads of Jokull, and when they rested all she could hear was her own breath. She didn’t have any idea of where they were or where they were going. And she didn’t care. Soon she would be free.
*
On the second night they rode through thick bushes right into the heart of a dying forest that her escort declared portentously as Vilewood. Little could calm her nervousness at entering the darkness. The pungency of the sodden vegetation was intense, and occasionally a bird would dart past, startling her.
Eventually, she could see pairs of white lights bordering a path towards a clearing, and their horse headed instinctively in that direction. On closer inspection the lights were shaped like candles, but the flames were like none she’d ever seen, tiny spheres balanced on the tips of sticks – cultists were indeed the proprietors of bizarre objects. The trail of lights cut through the forest, and her vision was soon limited to no further than their radiance.
‘We now dismount,’ the cultist declared.
They arrived at what she thought was a small shack of a church, but it wasn’t the male and female gods, Bohr or Astrid, who were worshipped here, but that mysterious technology over which the cultists had a monopoly. Any Jorsalir carvings had been destroyed – instead, diagrams of bizarre instruments and etchings of numbers and symbols were scrawled across the walls.
Lan was ushered through the arch and down a spiral staircase, her bag of clothing in her hands, and guided onto a small plinth in the dark where she sat with her legs dangling over the edge, waiting, shivering and listening to an increasing hum.
It was all so quick.
Bright lights and disjointed thoughts, and her eyes closed as if by force—
*
Eyes wide open.
White stone carvings and columns and friezes filled her vision. A massive daedal mural covered the ceiling, a picture of metallic landscapes and curious, box-like creatures. For a moment she stared dumbly, and then the contents of her stomach began to churn.
Men and women in pale-coloured garb glanced over her as she shakily pushed herself up. Their presence was a blur. Instantly Lan made to vomit and a woman darted in to throw a bucket under her head. She threw up into it, collapsed to her knees, clutching the container and, when she’d finished spluttering, looked around embarrassed, cautiously wiping her mouth on the cloth handed to her.
‘Welcome, sister.’
Lan pushed herself upright and breathed heavily. ‘Sorry about . . . doing that. I couldn’t help it.’ What an entrance, Lan.
The faces of those gathered were pleasant, full of cheer, and she could sense that they meant her no harm.
‘It’s all right, sister,’ a voice chimed.
‘Such methods of travel have side effects,’ another explained. ‘These things often happen when your body is snatched from one place and relocated thus.’
They seemed like a chorus narrating her progress in a play.
‘Where am I?’ she said.
Sensual incense and warm lighting drifted from strange sources; this room appeared acutely modern. Seeing Cayce’s face, and it being the only vaguely familiar sight, she floundered towards him.
‘Ysla,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Ysla.’ She remembered his voice, his particular tones. Cayce stood aside and watched as the gathered people began to analyze her and sketch her. A hubbub fluttered around the room as more people came in to observe this newcomer, this outsider.
‘Ye-yes. Of course,’ Lan stuttered, and then her reason for being there struck her in force. As she became utterly self-conscious of being a freakish experiment, the muscles in her legs gave way and she almost collapsed.
Cayce swept in, took her arm and, with one hand under her shoulder, eased her back onto her feet. He hauled her hessian bag across his shoulder and the crowd parted to let them through.
Her legs wobbled again as they went up a set of stairs up to the exit. Then suddenly, there at the top, in this world beset by ice, she experienced such warmth, such brightness . . .
There was not a single cloud in the sky.
THREE
Days later, and she was on a brilliant white beach stained pink by the rising red sun.
Pebbles. Wisps of seaweed. A sword half-buried in the sand, the hilt jutting up without function. Further along the beach were bizarre metal lattices towering up into the skies. They bled into the distance, several of them, elegant, rusting and redundant behemoths.
These were the first images Lan saw, as the mental fog was dispersed by the tidal roar and the pungency of the coast that assaulted her. The sea breeze was cool against her skin: the thought prompted her to glance across herself. Bare feet, khaki breeches, her long-sleeved white shirt – she had no recollection of these items at first, they weren’t hers, they weren’t her, but soon enough the images flashed back.
It’s all happening so quickly . . .
Her new body thronged with pain. Muscles seemed to spasm whenever she moved, and even though there weren’t bruises where she expected them, it didn’t diminish the pulses of agony. Cayce had warned her, of course, and she knew exactly what to expect – but the theory and the reality were quite separate. These were the effects of sorcery, even if Cayce would have hated her using the term. She was living a fantasy, a dream, and she couldn’t quite believe it. Cayce had explained that it was something she must grow used to, and from now on she must to learn to lose the years of layered frustrations, drop her self-consciousness around others.
Because she had undergone a major transformation.
Lan shaded her eyes from the intensity of the light and pushed herself up, sand clumping to her arms. She still hadn’t become used to this temperature, this balmy, sultry warmth. There were a lot of things she wasn’t used to.
Further down the shore, two of the indigenous Cephs were handling a boat, steering it onto the shore. Their handling was awkward. Pale-skinned and hairless, the creatures were humanoid save for their arms, which were thick purple and pink tentacles several feet in length. They curled to and fro, each with pulsing suction cups.
The Cephs hauled nets bulbous with fish, and lugged them up the beach, through sedges and reeds and onto land. Aside from their shaggy breeches, they were utterly bare-skinned, and she still could not quite discern where the human body ended and these marine appendages began, so gradual was their change in morphology. Contrary to what she had first thought – that these were creations of the cultists – Cayce had informed her that they were part of the natural tribes of the Boreal Archipelago. Over the tens of thousands of years of human and rumel military dominance, they had taken sanctuary off and on the coast of Ysla, where they remained living peaceful, simple lives.
Lan breathed in deeply this clean air, content with watching the Cephs go about their business, their tentacles unfurling majestically around bundles of fish, or massive planks of wood in order to repair their huts.
The sky was vacant except for the flight antics of pterodettes, and their reptilian squawks echoed across the bay. Out to sea, a few tiny boats were navigating the treacherous channels, gullies and tiny whirlpools around the reefs. The surf folded over itself, endlessly – and the repetitions were intoxicating. The landscape served to calm her mind and, if ever there was a place in which to recover from such painful surgical procedures, then this was it. If she could bring herself to believe in the Jorsalir tales, then this would be what she hoped the heavenly realms would be like.
Am I dead?
She stood upright, stretched tentatively, then more snaps of pain savaged her nerves. She grinned. No, most definitely alive. Lan bent her arms this way and that, trying to
work out the pain.
She turned back to face the city in the deep distance, a construct of wood and stone and metal. It blended in with the texture of the vegetation, yet towered above, dominating the panorama.
Villarbor, the forest city.
Cayce called it a treetop metropolis in which cultist magic flickered in and out of existence, but to her eyes Villarbor was a city of violent sorcery. She had been barely conscious when she entered the place, but there was plenty of the weird to alarm her. Nothing there seemed to make sense; it was a phenomenally different way of life. Magic charged through the skein of streets. Buildings were constructed from, and within, the trunks of titanic trees that seemed settlements in themselves.
Each lightning-pulse of magic that now boomed in the distance sent a quiver through her body.
With that in mind, she sauntered along the sand, a slow arc around the beachhead. Such beautiful heat, she thought. I don’t ever want to go back to Jokull, that freezing island.
Further up the shore she spotted a lone figure. Cayce was sitting on a rock smoking a roll-up. He was wearing a cream-coloured outfit. She could smell his heady weed from a distance. As she approached, sand squelched between her toes.
He looked her up and down, brushing his stubbled chin. He analyzed her anatomy, and she knew by now that there was nothing sexual in his examination. This was merely one of his inspections.
‘So you are enjoying the beaches, I see,’ Cayce said.
‘Something like that. The Cephs – they’re bizarre people, aren’t they? We don’t have anything like that where I’m from.’
Cayce frowned, scanning the Cephs in the distance, but he didn’t acknowledge her words. Rubbing his arms, he said, ‘You look really good, Lan, and I mean that. You were already in impressive physical shape – there are a good many unhealthy people, with all that ice.’ Despite his slightly unusual accent, he spoke with utter confidence, as if he was always declaring something profound, and whether or not he knew it, his words were helping to rebuild her in places his science couldn’t quite reach.
‘When will I have to leave?’ she asked. ‘I’d love to hang around a little longer.’
‘We are all done, as far as I’m concerned,’ he replied. ‘Ysla, for its own sake, does not permit visitors. So, I’m afraid you will have to leave soon. You simply cannot stay – and it is not just for our good, but yours, too.’
Lan thought as much. ‘In the morning?’
‘Indeed.’ Cayce jumped down from the rock, his cream cloak flailing around him in the breeze. Marram grass rippled along the edge of the dunes whilst a flock of gulls suddenly filled the sky before drifting in circles along the shore.
‘There are some festivities tonight – cultural celebrations for one of the orders. You may as well enjoy the night before you head back – just, if you please, try not to talk to too many of the others.’
‘For my own good?’ Lan asked.
‘You have, it seems, caught on well.’ Cayce turned and Lan moved to follow him across the sand.
*
The approach to Villarbor was contoured with surges of trees and plants that seemed alien to the Archipelago. Spiked structures and fat-leafed things and explosions of gaudy colours. Heavy, almost monstrous insects droned in and out of the foliage, snapping back branches with their clumsy flight. Other creatures drilled holes through bark, filling their venous sacs with sap.
The stone track was well-kept, tidied regularly by small teams of men and women. They cleared paths of vegetation with strange relics shaped like a crossbow, with minimal effort, and it was not at all obvious how the devices worked.
Lan never understood why, on an island without money, anyone would want to do such jobs, yet they did. Surely you should be paid for having to do chores like this? They stopped their tasks to gather around and talk to her, and she had to strain to follow their accents. She forced a smile in her effort to cease being self-conscious. Their clothing was garish, and woven with little patches in the style of harlequins. Not one of them dressed identically, and both genders sported equally unique variants of style, and wore bright flowers in their hair – which made her frown since back on Jokull flowers were generally worn only by women.
Cayce humoured them all for a moment, but then steered her onwards towards Villarbor. She waved her goodbyes over her shoulder.
Further up the road she asked, ‘Are we in a hurry for a reason?’
‘They will spend all day talking to an outsider,’ Cayce replied. ‘We do not get many of your kind here – a layperson from the Empire, I mean.’
‘Why is that anyway?’ Lan asked.
‘It is just easier that way,’ Cayce said.
‘You said that last time, too.’
‘I probably did,’ was his non-committal response. ‘We are simply taught that outsiders have a tendency to corrupt – I wish our society to remain harmonious, is all.’
‘One more question,’ Lan said.
‘Just one?’
She paused and chuckled. ‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just exciting for people like me, that’s all.’
‘Your question?’
‘How come you were allowed off the island? Seems as if everyone else is curious about me – but does no one ever leave?’
‘Few people want to leave. They are free to do so, of course, but they hear of the many tragedies of the Archipelago, and want nothing whatsoever to do with it.’
‘And you . . . How come you travel?’
‘My experiences and feelings are not entirely like the others,’ he replied, and marched on before she could press him any further.
*
Fields rolled back in all directions. Various colours denoted what must have been dozens of different crops covering small plots of land, unlike the vast, intensive efforts on Jokull. Clusters of huts and thickly wooded copses were dotted everywhere, surrounded by strange climbing fruits.
The sun was sliding from the sky, the heat still unbelievably prominent. Cayce said that the cultists managed the weather in Ysla. Whilst around the Archipelago winds and clouds heaped ice and snow, here there was little but clear skies and intoxicating warmth. It was no wonder the cultists kept this island to themselves.
She had seen the process of manipulation and been mystified. Figures perched on a hill, tilting some device towards the sky and, on the next hill along, another working in tandem. Purple shafts of light had buried deep into any clouds that persisted, disintegrating them slowly or ploughing through into the heavens. Whatever they were doing, these acts were certainly keeping the weather favourable.
Lan didn’t spot where the city actually began. As they approached the urban fringes of the settlement, they passed through smaller hub communities – and Cayce explained that this was the real principle behind Villarbor; not one centralized district but lots of them, all small interconnected zones. Between each stretched small grassland meadows, which were punctuated by mats of purple or white flowers, then secondary growth forest and coppiced trees – and then majestic woodland. Now and then they became something more formal, gardens that frothed over into one another, coloured plants blending into the distance.
The smells, the pungency, the colours, the textures, were like nothing she’d ever known.
‘The gardens are remarkably pretty,’ she commented, still on Cayce’s heels.
He strode on and said, ‘They are not meant for aesthetic purposes – we use everything in this particular district for medicinal value. Each plot is divided up by the ailment they treat. Districts specialize, most for food, but others for purposes like this.’
They passed a single-storey house surrounded by one such garden, and three women standing in casual conversation.
‘Good afternoon, sisters,’ Cayce called out.
One of them, a dark-haired girl, seemed to act coyly towards him, waving but turning away quickly, her white skirt trailing her in an arc.
‘Guessing you’re a heartbreaker here,’ Lan observed, hopin
g that the casual conversation might open him up.
‘I have no idea what you mean,’ he replied.
‘You know. Girl saves herself for you, thinks of you a lot, tells all her friends how charming you are.’
Cayce shrugged and laughed. ‘I would, indeed, hate to be in such a position of power over another person.’
Power – there it was again, a word that seemed electrically charged on this island, one spoken of with great disdain.
Into the forest proper and, after stepping between two giant buttress roots, they entered a zone that was clearly central to Villarbor.
Woodland towered before her, a million shades of green and brown that ultimately blended to become a dark haze in the distance. Thick, red-brown trunks extended upwards, losing themselves within a densely packed canopy. Alongside the trees, metallic structures extended like scaffolding. On others, vast ornate staircases wound themselves anticlockwise around the timber. Tracks had been cut between trees, in numerous directions, through an undergrowth of ferns.
‘What species are these?’ Lan asked.
‘Oh, we have various Tsuga, Taxodium, Sequoia . . . We have some rarer varieties further in.’
‘Why such interesting names?’ Lan stared up at the amazing textures to the bark.
‘These are, to our knowledge, the names given to the species when the seeds were stored, several millennia ago. Civilizations rise and fall, and after one particular fall, possibly due to some apocalyptic event, the landscape became devoid of forests. The forests of the world have since been re-grown. It is a sadness that we no longer know their original names.’
Clustered huts formed tree-crown dwellings. Walkways traversed the canopy and, above, unbelievably, people were wandering back and forth as if on the streets of a city. Food-filled baskets were constantly lowered and raised from the ground. Tiny lights cascaded down from branches, illuminating the more atramentous corners of the treescape – and Lan wondered how magical it would look at night. Within the gaps in the canopy, brown balloon-like crafts were gracefully lowering themselves towards respective platforms. People disembarked in their droves, mainly humans, but rumels, and the occasional Ceph too – from this distance, they all looked like insects.
Book of Transformations Page 3