Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

  “What did it look like?” Namior asked. She sounded worried, and Kel guessed it was the challenge of her trust for the Komadians, as much as what they might be building.

  “It’s not what it looked like that troubles me,” Mell said. “It’s black as the ink from ten-leggers. Square, thirty paces to a side, maybe as tall as me. I couldn’t see windows or doors. And the stuff to build it was coming out of a machine.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “It flowed. The machine was bigger than any I’ve seen down here, and it walked on eight thin metal legs. Steam came from several openings in its body, and water dripped to the ground and sizzled when it touched. The black stuff came from two vents in its stomach, and it was runny, soft. Soon after coming out it grew hard. And the machine went back and forth, layering the stuff and making the thing higher as I watched.”

  They stood in silence, save for Mygrette, who hummed some silent agreement.

  “And they didn’t see you?” Kel asked after a while.

  “I don’t think so. I left quickly, came back to the farm, and didn’t sleep all night.”

  Kel looked at Namior, and she surprised him by offering no explanation.

  “You should go and see,” Mygrette said to Kel.

  “What good would that do?”

  “I don’t know,” the witch said. “What good could it do, wood-carver?”

  “I don’t want to see again,” Mell said. “I’m digging. I’m still digging.”

  Namior hugged her friend and whispered something in her ear, and Kel saw a single tear mark a trail down Mell’s filthy cheek.

  Then Namior turned to him and smiled. “I’ll go with you. We can pass by the Healing Hall, and I’ll see if they need my help.”

  “Care, both of you,” Mygrette said.

  “Take a rest,” Kel replied.

  “Tsk!” The witch waved him away and reached for her machine, slapping its side once again. “Magic rests, so we’ve to be on our guard ten times stronger.”

  Walking away, Kel asked Namior what she had whispered to Mell while they hugged.

  “I told her to keep believing until there’s no longer any hope.”

  “Poor Trakis,” Kel said. Hopeless, he thought. It’s a miracle she survived down there, but up here…? Hopeless.

  “Mygrette has suspicions about you,” Namior said.

  “She is a witch.”

  “So am I.”

  “But she’s old and naturally mistrustful,” Kel said, hoping he had not hurt Namior’s feelings. “And sometimes I think she has the eyes of a cliff hawk and the mind of a skull raven.”

  “So how much do you think she knows?”

  “I don’t think she believes that I’m just a wood-carver.” Mygrette had long been a worry for Kel, and he was glad that no one else seemed to see the way she looked at him. Perhaps that was the reason he and the old witch had formed a cautious friendship; she because she wanted to know more, and he because it made him feel like the person he had once been. He had a hatred for that person, but deep down, he sometimes missed the life. There had been excitement as well as danger, wonder alongside fear. Mygrette had seen some of that past in his eyes and, for all he knew, read it somehow from his mind.

  “Well, you are a wood-carver,” Namior said. “Even if it is only one of your many talents.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Talking about last night?” But Namior did not honor him with a response.

  They walked across the hardening layers of silt, passing between the sad remains of tumbled buildings and holes dug by those searching for lost loved ones. Where the rope ladder had provided temporary access to Drakeman’s Hill, there was a set of rock steps held in place by heavy metal struts. A group of Komadians and their machines worked beside the rough ramp, piling more rocks against its side and fixing the metal with loud thuds. A few Noreelans milled around them, but they seemed to be redundant. The steam-breathing machines were doing all the work.

  “Kel.” Namior grabbed his arm, and they halted. “Do we really need to go up and see? Shouldn’t we just do what you planned?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” he said. “The island’s our goal, but I need to look at the thing Mell saw. It could be relevant. Could give us a clue.”

  “Maybe it’s just something to do with how their machines run.”

  “Way up there?” He nodded at the steep slope before them, buildings clinging like the massive limpets that rode their larger trawlers. “Beyond the village? They are obviously trying to keep it a secret. There’s something wrong with it, but—”

  “Is it familiar? Have you ever seen anything like she described?”

  “None of this is familiar to me, Namior. That’s why I have to be certain, one way or the other.”

  “And you can’t just…?” She touched his jacket pocket where he kept the communicators. He had debated telling her how they worked, just in case anything happened to him, but Core secrecy was deeply ingrained.

  “I’ve told you why,” he said, awkward. Speaking the words again would be difficult. Because if I call them, they might come here and kill me for desertion.

  Namior stared up at Drakeman’s Hill. Smoke came from a few of the buildings, and halfway up the hill they could see the long, low structure of the Healing Hall. “Then if we’re stopped, that place is our excuse,” she said.

  Surprised by how quickly she had embraced their covert aims, Kel smiled and followed Namior toward the ramp.

  They passed the Komadians without comment, returning smiles from the visitors and using the structure they must have erected while much of Pavmouth Breaks slept. Kel found something vaguely distasteful about their smiles and good humor, expressed as they were above a sea of mud that imprisoned scores, perhaps even hundreds, of dead. They should have been contrite and humbled. They should, if their need to help was honest and pure, have averted their eyes from the people for whom their arrival had caused so much suffering.

  When he glanced at them, he was searching for something that set them apart. Something in their eye, Mygrette had said. Many worked in open-necked shirts, and they had no gills on their necks. A few had even removed their upper garments, sweating in their labors, and no strange appendages waved from beneath their shoulder blades. They were as human as the Noreelans.

  Am I just too suspicious? he thought for the hundredth time. But he followed Namior up through the narrow alleys of Drakeman’s Hill, and her own willingness to question what was happening urged him on.

  They passed several buildings with dirty, torn and soaked clothing nailed to the front doors: the garments of the dead. It made Kel sad, but at least these families had retrieved the bodies of their loved ones. There would be many others mourning those who would never be found.

  When they reached the narrow path that led to the Healing Hall, Namior told him to sit and rest while she went to visit. She promised she would not be long. He wished she would pass by the Hall and carry on with him, but he respected her sense of duty. So he sat on a bench beside the path, looked out toward the harbor and the open sea beyond, and it was from there that he saw the first of the big ships coming in.

  It was a three-master, sails billowing grandly in a breeze that Kel could barely feel. From that distance it looked like a well-built craft, and it rode the waves with grace. Two more were following, one of them halfway from the island, the other having just left. He was not surprised, but the sight sent a chill through his bones, part fear, part anticipation. As the potential danger increased, so he felt as if he were coming alive again.

  The first ship anchored a hundred steps from the mole and commenced to lower sail. By the time Namior appeared again the ship was disgorging several launches, all of them apparently packed with Komadians. It was hard to see clearly from so far, but they appeared no different from those already working in the harbor.

  “A friendly invasion,” Kel muttered. He touched the package in his jacket pocket and wondered whether he was putting too much imp
ortance on himself.

  “There’s a young healer here,” Namior said. “Barely a teen, but she’s doing well. She knows potions and mixes, and doesn’t seem concerned that magic is distant today.” She sat next to Kel. “The badly injured are dead now. The girl’s taking care of the rest. I offered to help, but she said she was doing fine on her own. Young pride.” She rested her head on Kel’s shoulder, then noticed the ships for the first time. “Oh.”

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  “Do you think—?”

  “The signal was sent last night. I can’t see anyone at the harbor about to contest their landing. So let’s go and find what Mell saw being built.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I’ll decide whether to call them here or not.”

  Namior tapped his pocket again. “Whatever you have there… It sends its message by magic?”

  Kel slowly closed his eyes as realization dawned. Fucking idiot, he heard O’Peeria mocking, you’ve left it too late! Waited so they could mess things up, block things, and now—

  “I can find somewhere,” he said. “Outside the village. If I need to, I’ll find a way.” But fear was settling into him, a fear that magic’s disruption was far more than an accident. If I need to, I’ll find a way.

  NAMIOR COULD SEE that Kel was suffering, indecision and fear combining to press him into action. But she could also see a look in his eyes that she had never noticed before. He was excited, and he looked alive.

  They passed his home with barely a glance and climbed the last few hundred steps to the top of Drakeman’s Hill. The paths began to level, and the buildings became more spaced out. Between some were large gardens bearing vegetable crops, fruits trees and swathes of herbs, soil-planted or hanging from elaborate herb nets. Other spaces were untended, given over to wild growth. It was there that Namior would find plants useful for her studies, given time, but Kel marched them quickly along the paths, possessed by greater purpose the farther they walked from the harbor.

  Namior remembered Kel once remarking on how strange it was that the steeper the hill, the more buildings were constructed there, almost as if the builders had relished the challenge. Namior had smiled, and nodded, and said that Pavmouth Breaks had always weathered hardships, which were reflected in the architecture of the place. Why build somewhere flat and out of sight of the harbor, when a steep slope such as Drakeman’s Hill offered a far more complex challenge?

  She rarely came up so far. While she was trapped in the village for the duration of her studies, she did not like to see what she was missing. And as Mell had said, the heights above Drakeman’s Hill were a whole new world.

  She could hear the sea between gentle gusts of wind, and perhaps she always would, however far inland she traveled. And she could still smell it, when the wind carried the scents her way. But if she looked inland, she could no longer see the sea, and it was easy to imagine that she was somewhere else entirely. There were two farms visible from where they stood, the closest being where Mell and her parents had spent the previous night. The farmstead consisted of several larger stone barns, a house built of timber and mud, and some smaller buildings, a few of them tumbled into disrepair. The fields around the farm were divided by low stone walls topped with the spiked airthorn plant, so named because it seemed to consist entirely of thorns. Some fields were home to wandering flocks of sheebok, the versatile cattle that provided meat, clothing, guts for fishing line, lamp oil and obscure and questionable medicines. Others held several larger, lumbering choes, while unoccupied fields were planted with great swathes of grain, root crops and hanging fruit vines. An old machine sat close to a wall nearby, and Namior knew it had not moved for at least ten years. Its flesh-and-blood parts had rotted away to nothing, and its metallic limbs and skirting had rusted to the color of the soil it was slowly sinking into. No one seemed sure of what had happened to the machine, but some said that the farmer himself had destroyed it, suddenly eager to dispense with magic’s help. It was not something that Namior had ever understood, but since meeting Kel she had come to realize that there were those who did not trust magic as completely as she did.

  Beyond the farm were gently rolling hills, more airthorn-topped stone walls, a few small copses of trees, a lake surrounded by tall, lush undergrowth. Past the lake rose Steep Hill, green and tall and shielding the wilds of Noreela from view.

  Namior had climbed the gentle slopes to its summit several times before, and each time the large expanse of countryside beyond had both thrilled and terrified her. Steep Hill had always been the notional border of Pavmouth Breaks, a natural divide that generations of fisherfolk and farmers had treated as the extreme southeastern limit of their village. As such, beyond Steep Hill there were the wilds; no buildings, no differentiated fields, no planted crops or maintained woodland, and no signs of civilization. One rough trail led along the far base of Steep Hill toward the River Pav valley to the north, but even that was often overgrown, or shielded from view by the wild undergrowth that grew rampant across the lower slopes of the hill.

  There’s the rest of the world, Namior had thought the first time she stood atop the hill. And one day I’ll get to see it. The concept had been exciting and intimidating. Now, looking at the hill as she and Kel walked toward it, she was suddenly more afraid than ever.

  What would the Komadians be doing so out of sight?

  And how did they even get there?

  “We should go south first,” Kel said. “Skirt around the Throats, climb the shoulder of the hill from that side.”

  “Trying to stay hidden?” she asked.

  “If they’re hiding something, it’s the route they’ll least expect anyone from the village to take.”

  They followed the line of the sea cliff for a while, never walking too close to the edge. There was a rough path there, worn by villagers who liked to come and collect gull eggs, or the more rare cliff-snake skins. The skins were tough, transparent and flexible, and were often used to coat and waterproof the large hats worn by fishermen. But the path only went as far as the second farm’s extremes, and past that point Kel and Namior had to forge their own way through thickets of gorse, wind saps and hardy stone heathers.

  As they approached the place where they would turn to head east, Namior saw a fluttering movement from the corner of her eye. She paused and looked out to sea, and hovering a hundred steps from them was one of the several cliff hawks that nested along that part of the coast. Its wings barely flapped, feathers rippling in the updraft, and it seemed to be looking directly at her. She gasped, held her breath and went slowly to her knees. She was aware of Kel paused to her left, but she did not want to turn her head in case it changed the moment. I don’t want to move on, she thought. Here and now is fine, I can live like this for a while. Whatever is to come… that can wait.

  The graceful bird dipped slightly, then rose again with one gentle flap of its wings. It hovered in the same place, staring at her, and Namior wondered whether it was thinking the same thing. Perhaps even in a cliff hawk’s life there were some moments that seemed to matter more than others.

  “Namior,” Kel whispered, but she did not move, could not respond.

  A breath of wind ruffled her hair, she blinked, and the bird was flying directly at her, wings folded back and cruel beaked head thrust forward.

  She barely had time to draw breath before the hawk struck the cliff face six steps to her right and a dozen down. It was out of view for a beat, and then it dipped away from the cliff again, something small and squealing grasped in its big claws. It’s almost as if it didn’t see me, Namior thought. But she knew that was not the case at all.

  “Come on,” Kel said. “We need to climb Steep Hill now.”

  “Did you see that?”

  Kel smiled and nodded. “I didn’t get the head quite right, I know that for sure.”

  “You did well, wood-carver.” She took his outstretched hand and followed him inland.

  THEY CLIMBED THE shoulder
of Steep Hill, and all the way up Kel’s hand rested close to the handle of his short sword. He’s not the man I fell in love with, Namior thought over and over, and everything she saw of him now was strange. The weapons he wore, the way he stalked up the hillside, hand on his sword… she recognized none of that. Yet in truth, she was seeing the real Kel for the first time. And behind the tough new veneer that he had revealed, she perceived his desperate hope that she would love him still.

  She might well be a witch, but she was too confused right then to know what she really thought. All she could be certain about was that she had to stay with him.

  Steep Hill was aptly named. In parts they climbed quite easily, breathing coming harder and shins burning with the exertion. At other times they went on hands and feet, almost holding on to the hillside as if it were doing its best to cast them off. It was not a particularly high hill, though, and soon Namior could see its summit cutting a hard line across the sky just above them. Kel had paused, lying flat to the hillside and holding his left hand behind him, palm up, signaling her to stop. He crawled forward slowly, and when he was high enough to see beyond the hill he paused and remained in that position for some time.

  She wanted to call out and ask what he saw. She considered crawling up beside him. But he was so utterly motionless that she did not want to be the one to move.

  At last he turned his head, very slowly, and looked back down at her. For a beat his face was blank, his eyes distant and dark. Then he focused on her, blinked and motioned her to join him.

  “What is it?” she whispered as she crawled. But Kel turned away without speaking, lying flat on the hilltop once more.

  The urge to rush was overwhelming, but she kept her movements slow and considered. To her what they were doing was exciting and terrifying in equal measure. Is this how he always lived his life before Pavmouth Breaks? Before me?

  When she could see down the other side of the hill she settled into the grass and moss, all the strength going from her. “What in the Black is that?”