by Marc Secchia
“Woman, I desire a moment’s coherent thought,” I growled, but without rancour. “And I am half-Eldrik, may I remind you?”
“I didn’t know I was courting a timber wolf.”
I laughed, but recognised there was within both of us an instant, unspoken tension that we were trying to beat away with our frivolity. “We have to try to help Amal.”
The Wurm was still advancing. I felt it in my marrow, although I had hoped this day would be the last of our run. I must have miscounted. I did not know how I had come from the foothills of the Lyrn Mountains to the Nugar river, truly told–if indeed we were carried by jerlak. Neither did P’dáronï have any recollection of that time. That was the problem. We did not know when exactly the twenty-eighth day would be run, and the Wurm would repair to its rest.
But we were ready to rest. Oh, Mata, were we ready!
“I wouldn’t have made this run without you, P’dáronï.”
“Me neither,” she retorted, and we laughed together.
Only with her power, I reflected, had I been able to find enough rest–barely enough rest–to stave off collapse. And only with my power could she have fled so far, so fast. We had both damaged our bodies; we both were skin on a rack of bones, and not a hairsbreadth of fat remained to cover our muscles or pad our bones. Mata grant us the strength …
“We must,” said P’dáronï. “She’s somewhere down there amongst those ships in the harbour, I sense, although from this distance–”
“Closer, then. Will Jyla sense the use of your power if you jump us around the bay?”
“I don’t believe so, Arlak-nih. This teleportation is a modification of the environment immediately around us–almost like folding a message. Can you hear the Qur’lik message drum?”
“I can,” said I, repressing a shudder. I was growing more skilled at the onion of Dissembling than I would have wanted to, but it was the only way to manage my instinctive response to that cold, impersonal override command structure. “Are you still able–?”
“I’m not that selfish!”
“Beloved, what you are is tired. Shattered–we both are.”
My chuckle at her borrowing one of my expressions hiccupped as we flickered and reappeared half a league around the corner of the bay. What a strange feeling, as though the sound had for a moment dropped off the edge of eternity. We shifted again. It took longer this time, and as we wavered our way toward solidity, P’dáronï stumbled against me.
I caught her in my arms. “P’dáronï–”
“One more.”
“I’ll need your strength now … against Jyla.” She turned to me, cupping my cheeks with her hands. “Arlak–”
“I will run. You try to pinpoint the Eldrik ship.”
“Arlak–”
“Ay, I have no plan, no strength, and no hope against that Sorceress. But I will not stand by and see Amal destroyed! Worse, turned to their side. Larathi, woman, why will you not just do what I say?”
Mark my words, I could think of a dozen good reasons not to do as I had just proposed, but as I stood there shaking with vehemence, P’dáronï put her fingertip to my lips. “You are a good man, Arlak-nevsê. I feel as you do. I think I could grow used to this Arlak; he of passion and command and the unshakable desire to see this fate to its conclusion. And that’s why I will refuse Eliyan’s order until all that remains is the white of death. Mata grant us wings to fly.”
I kissed her fiercely.
And then we ran. I ran. I took the slight weight of P’dáronï upon my back and bounded across those cliff tops with the speed of the great eagles of Mara-Kern, where I had once taken an impromptu flying lesson, and the surety of a wild mountain goat whose cloven hooves can find purchase upon the very roof of the world itself. I poured strength into my muscles, tearing from my own person the nutrients to force my body into a sprint once more, a two-league sprint faster than perhaps any man has run before. Wind whistled eerily past my ears. I leaped sulg bushes in great bounds a dozen paces long and more, for ever since I fled Sillbrook Town after my beating at the hands of the possessed man Sathak, who I failed to heal, I had enjoyed greater strength than any ordinary man. How else could I run from the Wurm like some frightened rabbit evading the hawk’s swoop?
“Larathi!” I screamed as we pitched over the edge of an unseen precipice.
But my scream was cut off as we shifted through space and dropped heavily upon the far side.
“Fine,” I panted, thrusting off my skinned knees. “Have I told you … you’re amazing?”
I raced up a slope, heading for the top of the last hill before Gethamadi. It was a sizeable community, perhaps several thousand strong, which I had visited many anna before following my sojourn amongst the Frenjj, the beautiful, dark-skinned people of the Hakooi lowlands. That thought reminded me of a dusky desert maiden …
“Arlak!” P’dáronï hissed in my ear. “Who is Shalima and why do you have a picture of some bare-breasted, dagger-waving little harridan in your mind?”
So much for my onion not leaking! That honesty I had feared had bitten me more sorely than a desert cobra! I groaned. “Tell you … later?”
Her mental shout made me wince. “Any sign of–”
“Jyla seems to be moving without walking.”
I puzzled this over for perhaps a hundred strides before I realised what she must mean. “There’s a ship raising sail right now, coming out of the harbour,” I said. “Look with me–would that be where she is? It doesn’t look like a tollish ship to me. My father would have known. He was a sea captain.”
“Amongst other details you have yet to tell me about your past, evidently,” sniffed P’dáronï, clearly unwilling to let the matter of Shalima drop. “Shall I take us there?”
Again, the translation felt strained. We dropped upon the deck of that ship and I sensed, through the connection of our fingers, a powerful headache attack P’dáronï. I damped it at once.
But barely had our feet touched wood, when the Sorceress Jyla whirled upon her heel amidships and came stalking toward us. A smile touched her lips.
“Why, Arlak, you’re more persistent than a crazed torfly. Welcome aboard my ship.”
“Let Amal go!” I demanded.
Jyla paused close enough that I could see the detail of her black-in-black eyes, the way they seemed inured even to the brightest sunshine, oozing evil from their ageless depths. “But the Wurm is coming, Arlak. I felt the beast long before you arrived. I knew you were following. And, you fool, do you know what you’ve done?” She paused to laugh unpleasantly. “Look to the horizon behind me, you stupid lump of rockwood, and consider this–what path do you think the Wurm will take to this position?”
I stared at her. What was this? Where was Amal? Why did Jyla affect such gratification?
“Across the bay,” P’dáronï said.
The dread in her voice mirrored the chill that skewered my quoph upon a spear of cold, heavy iron. I knew she was right.
“Once, when I lived upon the accursed Isle of Birial,” Jyla said, “there was a seaquake nearby. It resulted in a stormtide. Do you know what a stormtide would do to Gethamadi, Arlak Sorlakson? How big has the Wurm grown? How many people think you live beside the peaceful ocean, oblivious to their fate?”
Her eyes studied me closely. A smile of malicious pleasure curved her lips as she considered my reaction to her words; as she doubtless read the calculation taking place behind my eyes. I could only imagine what a stormtide would do to Gethamadi. The pretty whitewashed cottages nestled down at the water’s edge. The teeming marketplace was right beside the harbour
, where the fishing vessels would unload their catch directly into the vendors’ stalls. We had little time to act. Not enough time both to save Amal, and to save the three or four thousands who lived in that town.
Out there I saw a thin blue line had formed beneath a frowning storm-sky. That line crossed the bay from shore to ocean. A line that was moving toward us in a way contrary to the flow of the swell and the action of the waves; a line fuelled by enormous, unnatural power. Seen across the leagues it looked trivial, but I knew it had to be a wave many men high.
“You’re a monster!”
“Have a pleasant swim, El Shashi!”
And the last I saw of Jyla was her smile shimmering into the mist as P’dáronï translated us off that vessel. She took us straight to the Qur’lik message drummer. Indeed, we fell upon the drummer and his assistant, who swore and flailed at us briefly before they realised we meant no harm.
“My name is El Shashi,” I said to the startled drummer. “Anna ago I healed your eldest daughter of a harelip, right here in this square. Now I need you to listen well, for every life in this town depends upon what we do. I swear this upon the holiness of Mata’s name.”
Praise Mata for P’dáronï’s quick thinking. For listening even to the unspoken thoughts of my quoph; for knowing what was needed even when I did not.
With the help of the Qur’lik drummer we mobilised the townspeople to rush to the hills which overlooked their town. Before a quarter makh had passed there was a great exodus from the town–jatha lowing, children crying, carts piled high with panicked humanity. Thrice did P’dáronï remove the elderly and the infirm from the town square, and each time, I felt her fade further and expected her return the less. The toll was immense. I touched her to aid her as I could, but despaired. It was too little; P’dáronï was too weak
Each time I looked out to the bay that blue line had moved closer; swelling, growing deeper of hue. The clouds above, to my perception seeming bloated with a load Nethe’s darkest malice, bellied upward into the vaulting heavens as if seeking to storm the very bastions of Mata Herself. A chill, ill wind stirred dead leaves through the empty town–empty, truly told, save of those too foolish to flee, or those who tarried to loot the shops and homes of their neighbours and friends. The Eldrik ship was making tremendous headway out into the bay, swinging north along the coast toward the Straits of Nxthu and thereafter, Eldoran. I assumed that it was Jyla who filled her sails with wind–Mata consign her soul to eternal torment. Surely no oceangoing vessel could otherwise skim across the waters like a great sea bird?
But as I herded people up into the hills I could only gnash my teeth at the sight of the hated Sorceress slipping away once more. Into every face and every cart and every knot of people I cast my gaze, anxious for a glimpse of fair hair amongst the endless bobbing browns and blacks, but P’dáronï was nowhere to be found. We had not made arrangements to meet up. All had happened too quickly. Last I had seen her she had transported a group of ten people, including the Qur’lik drummer, away from the town square. Now I must find her. My grephe burned! I knew something was wrong … we had to keep running from the Wurm!
Next I looked back over my shoulder it was to see the area abutting the harbour area strangely bare. Truly told, the area covered by seawater but moments before was now transformed into a vast mud flat where fish and eels flopped about, gasping for air, and crabs looked stupidly at each other is if discussing what had happened. My eyes rose. And widened. The sea had risen to meet the clouds.
“Run for your lives!” I bellowed. “Run!”
Now, with a rumbling that shook the world, the stormtide swept toward Gethamadi in a single, majestic wall. Such a thing should not be. The mind could scarce credit it–the people before me began to shriek like lyoms rattling in a cage. I dodged them, leaped bodies trampled in the rush, broke away from the trail to dash up toward the wooded brow of the hill. Branches whipped past my face, but I cared nought.
As I ran I screamed, over and over again, “Grab a tree! Hold your children!”
I burst over the brow where a great mass of townspeople huddled; stunned, weeping, bleating their fright to the heavens. I pitied them. I cursed the fool who had brought his Wurm straight across the bay; an arrow of ultimate doom pointed at their town.
“P’dáronï! P’dáronï of Armittal!”
The thunder grew so loud it drowned out my cries. I looked, and saw the wave dwarf the ships left stranded upon the mud of the harbour bottom. It swept over them as though they did not exist, and swept over the pretty houses of Gethamadi with awesome force. The stormtide was many times the height of the houses. Stone and wood and tile gave it no pause. I saw a few small dots that had to be looters bursting out of a house. In an eye blink they were swallowed up. The water surged up the hillside toward us, eating up rocks and trees and bushes as though it were a beast more ravenous than the Wurm itself. It pulverised trees and pushed the splinters before it as though a child pushed toys about the floor of her house. I saw a fishing skiff riding atop the wave toward me.
But as the stormtide dashed its fury against the hills, as though it wished to demolish them, too, the waters slowed and eventually came to a foaming halt around my ankles. Reluctantly, the wave began to suck and slurp away down the hill.
I wandered through that mass of sodden, pitiful humanity for what seemed a makh crying, “P’dáronï, P’dáronï,” until my throat was hoarse and I thought my quoph would break from the hopelessness of it. At some level I realised that the Wurm had vanished. It had never appeared in Gethamadi. But its wake had struck front and centre. Where people reached out or I noticed their need I touched them and healed what I could–several broken limbs, a fractured skull, a baby which had been accidentally dropped and kicked in the mad scramble.
But suddenly a muddied man tapped my shoulder. I recognised the drummer. “Come,” he said, and led me a short ways to where a huddle of people lay upon the ground. “Can you see to these? The sick and the infirm of health.”
“Where’s P’dáronï?”
“The blind Sorceress? Just yonder,” said he, pointing. “Alive, I hope.”
Ah, how my quoph soared!
I sensed her from where I stood–faintly, but she was there. I worked my way steadily in her direction, giving what little I was able. I did not wish to seem self-serving. But when I drew close enough to see how P’dáronï lay crumpled upon the uncaring stone in a foetal position, and how there was vomit splattered on her clothes and around her, I gave a low cry and rushed to her side. Her skin was pallid and cold.
Uncaring of my own tears I sobbed over her, “You gave too much, P’dáronï-nishka! You could have killed yourself!”
She was far gone. Her pulse was slow and weak, her breathing almost undetectable, her ashen lips tinged with a deathly blue I have often observed in those struggling with severe heart problems. Had she strained her heart exerting herself so mightily, I wondered? Pensively, I worked the pathways of her being. What was this creature, this Armittalese, I sought to inveigle back from the white of death? Was I restoring her merely to grant her the opportunity and means to carry out Eliyan’s command? Should I spare her the trouble?
Yet still I felt bound by Mata, heart, hand and hearth. Bound to Her will, bound to my fate, bound to walk until the road no longer stretched out before me. Had I not walked roads enough for many a lifetime?
El Shashi bowed his head and shed bitter tears for the victims of his Stormtide over Gethamadi.
With P’dáronï clutched close to my heart I walked the day it took, northward up the coast of Hakooi, to reach a village substantial enough to boast an inn. Here, I rented a room for us for the ridiculous price of two ukals. I lied about my wife being taken in a faint by the heat and travel. And I slept two days, save to wake for meals, and P’dáronï three. The first day, I could barely move for the soreness of my muscles. I spent the makh feeding her bowls of the innkeeper’s lyom and vegetable soup and massaging her th
roat to force her to swallow it. When my power revived I assuaged her hurts–at least, those I could fathom.
At dawn on the third day, I felt her hand touch my cheek. She whispered, “Is the Wurm gone?”
“P’dáronï-nevsêsh, it is over.”
I thought I was done with weeping, but her fingertip found the wetness upon my cheek. “Ay, Arlak-nevsê, it is over. You are well?”
“Much rested. Much saddened. Concerned about you.”
“You take too much note–”
“–of the affairs of my cherished slave? Great clods of steaming jatha droppings be heaped upon that untruth!”
P’dáronï’s lips curved upward in a way I had grown preposterously fond of. “You are grown very forceful of late, my Arlak. Now tell me of this Shalima before the jealousy eats me like some potent caustic from the inside out.”
“I’m not convinced this is wise,” I said, but opened my mind to share the memories with her nevertheless.
It was passing strange showing another person such deeply personal, long-buried things; she was a voyeur walking the halls of remembrance, and I had to force myself not to bristle in defence or hide anything. Had she not withheld from helping herself to my memories? Even if she could slip around my mental defences with quicksilver ease? I found I could monitor her response too–our connection was open in both directions. I wondered if P’dáronï allowed this deliberately.
For a time after that she was silent in reflection.
“And …?”
“You handled the Benka with great wisdom,” she said. “You gifted dignity to them.”
“I am miserable … P’dáronï, please!”
“I have to confess I’m not fond of the idea of a bodacious desert maiden bouncing her breasts around in your memory, Arlak-nih,” she smiled sweetly at me, “but you were also Matabound before and I have to accept that too. You had little choice and I noted your guilt-feelings surfaced often during that time. I will survive the pangs of jealousy. Will you show me some of those things you taught Shalima?”