by Tim Lebbon
“Just the two of us,” she said. “The others are asleep. So now’s the time for your questions and some truths from me.”
“I want to see Namior first,” Kel said, and that was suddenly the most important thing for him. The relief that she was still alive was soon masked by his growing sense of dread, but for that instant, to look on her face was his greatest wish.
The old woman waved one clawed hand at the stairs, and Kel went.
Upstairs, he stood by the open door to Namior’s attic room and looked inside. Many times they had made love on her bed, trying to ease the creaking of its wooden frame and stifle their groans and sighs. They had made promises to each other there, as well, and he had lied to her, because lying was a large part of being in the Core. Namior lay beneath a thin blanket. Her eyes were closed, several candles burned on shelves around the room, and Kel could see the rapid rise and fall of her chest. She made small noises in her sleep, and the room listened to her groans of pain, not pleasure.
Kel went in and kissed her gently on the lips. She did not react. She smelled of the sea, and he realized how special she was, not just to him but to everyone. She knew what was happening, and if she died, that would make him the only one.
“Live,” he whispered into her ear. “Please live, Namior.” Her only answer was a small sigh. He touched her hand and squeezed, then backed out of her room, keeping her in sight until the last possible moment.
Halfway down the staircase, he leaned against the wall as heat and light blossomed in his mind. His perception widened then closed in again, the briefest glimpse at infinity, and he smiled. Somewhere inland, Mygrette had planted and smashed his second communicator.
Back downstairs, Namior’s great-grandmother was sitting in the same position by the groundstone. She watched Kel enter the room and sit close to her on some floor cushions.
“Still sleeping,” she said. “The body heals better that way.”
“Your craze?” Kel asked.
She shrugged, and her good eye rolled in its socket, as if searching for her erstwhile madness. “Perhaps over the years, I’ve let my mind grow lazy. And a craze will feed on fear.” She took in a deep breath. “But I saw you bring Namior in, and saw what my granddaughter dug from her. And now I have to fight my fear for the ones I love.”
“You’re Core.” Kel knew there must be others like this, old members who had lost their way or left of their own accord, like him, hidden away here on the edge of Noreela. If there was one, there were many.
“Do I look like a soldier to you?” she asked, offering a toothless smile.
“Do I look like a wood-carver?”
“Appearances can deceive.”
“First lesson of the Core.”
“No, just common sense,” she said, “known to everyone who leads a life of deceit.”
Kel listened for noises from outside, but all was quiet. The only sound was the spit of burning candles, and the old woman’s harsh breathing. It was strange conducting a conversation with her—usually her words were confused, and sometimes she never spoke at all.
“Tell me,” he said.
The old woman sighed, and the weight of every year she had lived was expressed in that one, painful sound. “I’m a witch, like my daughter, and her daughter, and your Namior. Since you’ve been with her I doubt you’ve ever seen me leaving this home. But it wasn’t always so. Many years ago I led a… colorful life.” She smiled at old memories, then glanced up at Kel again. “Seen more of Noreela than you.”
“I’ve seen a lot.”
“Pah!” She waved her hand again, slapping his words from the air. “You’ve seen the parts of the land where people live. I spent the first thirty years of my witching times seeing the parts where people don’t live. The Poison Forests. Mol’Steria Desert, dodging Shantasi scouts and living in catacombs deep beneath the sands. Spent six years roaming Kang Kang, east to west and back again.”
“No one survives that long in Kang Kang,” Kel scoffed.
“And yet, here I am.”
“So what do you know of the Core?”
“Whispers,” she said. “But I spent some time following whispers, tracking them, listening to them harder than others. Because all whispers start somewhere.” She looked directly into Kel’s eyes, judging his reaction as she went on. “I know the Core has been in existence for over a thousand years.”
“Not that long,” he said.
“Maybe they just don’t tell you it’s that long. And they’re here to protect Noreela from threats from beyond.”
“The threat’s arrived,” Kel said. “Namior and I went to the island and saw what they were doing. Stealing our bodies. Using them as hosts for… I don’t know. Disembodied wraiths.”
“I met three Core soldiers on my travels,” she said, as if avoiding the subject of Komadia.
“How did you know they were Core?”
“I had a way of telling. One of them fled the moment I revealed my knowledge to him. The second, I killed. The third, I loved, and he became my husband.”
Kel could only stare wide-eyed, mouth agape. “Does Namior know?”
“Of course not!”
“And the one you killed?”
The old woman lowered her eyes and shook her head. “Everyone’s allowed their secrets.”
“I have to go,” Kel said, standing. “I’ve signaled them, they’ll be coming, but if I don’t do something they might be too late.”
“A place of wraiths,” she said. “That’s what they’ll find.”
“No!” Kel said, and her lack of faith made him even more determined.
“He told me so much,” she said. “About the Strangers, and what happens when they die. About the fears of invasion. The Core, their mission, their hunts. All the time, he thought he was sharing secrets, but I already knew it all. My husband died, and I never told him the truth.” She started crying dry, bitter tears that shook her shoulders and caught in her throat.
“The truth?”
The old woman looked up, and Kel realized that she was afraid. Not of her crazes, or the Komadians, or the way magic was somehow being held from the land. She was scared of him, Kel Boon.
“Namior should go with you,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “The two of you belong together, I’ve seen the love there. Leave Pavmouth Breaks before it’s too late.”
“How can she go with me?”
“Will you trust me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Kel stood. And with the old woman’s fear, came a little of his own.
“I can make her better.” She rose and shuffled away, heading for her small room at the rear of the house.
Kel had never been back there, but he followed her, unsettled by what she was saying and what it could imply. He stood in the doorway as she knelt before her bed and felt around beneath it. She drew out a small chest, dragging it across the floor with surprising strength.
“What’s that?” Kel asked.
“My secret life.” The woman stood and looked back at Kel, and he could see that she was excited. Scared, old, twisted with age…but still excited. “No one else has ever seen what’s in here. No one.”
Kel nodded, but said nothing.
Namior’s great-grandmother—witch, wanderer, Core killer and lover—opened the chest with a pendant that hung around her neck.
She took out a small blue box, weak candlelight shining from its metallic surface.
“We’ll need water,” she said, showing Kel the box.
“Why?”
“To make the steam.”
Kel took a clumsy step back, hand on the hilt of his sword.
“You won’t be needing that, Kel Boon.” She had not changed. She was still the little old woman he’d seen in Namior’s home a hundred times before. But she looked different to Kel, holding a device he did not recognize or understand, talking about the steam needed to drive it. And the crystal pendant caught his eye.
“You’re one of them!”
“Not for a very long time.”
He drew his sword, stepped forward quickly, and pressed its point to her neck. She stood still and calm, allowing him that moment, and when he used the sword to move aside her collar she turned her head so that he could see. There were no gills.
“And my back’s just old, wrinkled skin,” she said.
“You brought them here.”
“No!”
“You’ve been here all along, planning, making sure Pavmouth Breaks would be just right, and—”
“No, Kel,” she said, louder this time. “I left long ago, the same way my husband left the Core. The same way you left it.”
“You know nothing about me and the Core.”
“But you don’t deny you’re hiding from it?”
Kel said nothing.
“I’ve spent seventy years of my life on Noreela,” she said. “I’m as Noreelan as you.”
“You’re from somewhere else!”
“I left! I’ve no idea what they’ve told you, what you think you know, but the island was cursed many generations ago. Komadia is from the far south, way past the Blurring. Legend has it we were visited by one of your Sleeping—”
“More lies!”
“The truth, Kel! All but a few Komadians were ripped from their bodies and imprisoned in those terrible things. You can’t imagine the pain.” She glanced away, staring into an incomprehensible distance. “Those few who survived, the Elders, invested all their rage and loneliness into building great constructs, buried deep, to shift the island. Take it places where they could try to cure the curse.”
“By invading? Stealing?”
She shrugged, then looked down at his sword. Kel lowered it.
“The Elders’ descendants gave me this body and brought me back into the world. And Komadians are strong, Kel. First the host’s soul is cast aside, then with a strength born of frustration and rage, the changes to the body begin. Over time, the host’s blood becomes Komadian blood, and Komadia’s bloodline goes on. Mind alters body, Kel. It’s more than any Noreelan witch can achieve. But I always knew this body wasn’t my own, and I always grieved for its previous owner. Komadia’s way was not for me; I left when we manifested close to The Spine. I swam for a day and a night to flee that place, and the island moved on two moons later.”
Kel glanced down at the box in her hands. “You’ve kept that hidden all this time.”
“It’s not the only thing I brought with me, but it’s all I kept. I was a healer before I left Komadia, and I’ve been a healer ever since. But never once with this.” She shook her head. “I’m not even sure—”
“Don’t say it,” Kel said. “After all this, don’t tell me it won’t work.”
“I’m slave to a new magic now, wood-carver.” And her good eye looked haunted, and so very old.
UPSTAIRS, MOVING QUIETLY so as not to wake Namior’s mother, they stood beside the wounded woman’s bed, and watched her struggling to breathe.
“The impact shattered a rib and hit her lung,” her great-grandmother said. She poured water carefully into a small hole in the top of the blue metal device. She spilled a few drops, and they dripped onto Namior’s hand. She did not even flinch.
“Your magic will fix it?” Kel asked.
“No longer my magic.” She held up the box. “This is old knowledge of mine, that’s all.”
The old woman swilled the box around, and Kel saw its color change from light blue to dark. Then she stroked its sides, and on its surface a swathe of small, domed humps appeared, pushing up through the metal until they protruded a finger’s width above the box’s top. She looked back at Kel. “Pray to the Black.”
“I pray to nothing.”
“All you Core people, faithless. You think with all you’ve seen and know, you’d want to believe in something more.” She pulled back the blanket, opened Namior’s sleep shirt and placed the box between her breasts, just above the dreadful injury.
Namior gasped, groaned.
“Stay back,” the old woman said, even though Kel had not moved. “Trust me.”
He did. Komadian she might have been in the past, but he sensed a kindred spirit in the old woman. She had left a place she grew to dislike, and made her home elsewhere. He had left the Core and tried to settle in Pavmouth Breaks. Both of them were somewhere they should not be, trying to belong, and perhaps both of them were lost.
She must know so much …
But right then, Namior was the center of Kel’s world.
Steam hissed from several openings along the side of the box. The woman pressed some of the nodes on its upper surface, stroked others, her fingers flitting across them as if she were playing a delicate musical instrument. She maintained contact with the metal for a while, her eyes half-closed and lips moving slightly as she muttered silent words. Then she nodded and took one step back, gaze fixed on Namior’s ruined chest.
The steam formed strange patterns above the unconscious woman, twisting into shapes that were almost known, ideas on the verge of being seen. Kel could feel a breeze in the room from the badly fitted window, but the steam was untouched. It formed layers and swirls, waves and curtains of warm mist, then several thin metal legs sprouted from the sides of the box and dipped down into her wound.
Kel shifted forward, but only to look more closely.
He had seen Namior delving into broken flesh to knit bones and splice veins, her fingers working with a stunning dexterity. The machine did the same, only much faster, and its flexible limbs could reach into places where fingers would not. Namior’s breath bubbled and spat for a beat, and a fine spray of blood came from her mouth as she uttered a soft cough. Then the machine rose above the wound, limbs flexing and twisting too fast to be seen, and Kel watched, amazed, as first her flesh, then her skin was bound back together.
The old woman gasped, swayed and had to lean on the bed to prevent herself from collapsing. Kel went to help, but he found that he did not want to touch her. Unreasonable, irrational, but she was still one of them.
“I’m fine,” she said, sensing his turmoil. She chuckled, and for a beat he saw her craze showing through.
“But I need to ask you—”
“My heart, my old heart… I need rest. When she wakes, you can talk to me together.”
“One question,” Kel said, and he realized that he was unconsciously blocking the doorway. Could she move him? If she had to, if he forced it, could she fight him? The blue box was back in her hand, emitting puffs of steam and hissing quietly, and there was something strikingly eerie about it. Almost lifelike. And he decided that yes, she could fight him; but he also believed that she would not.
“One, then,” she nodded, exhausted.
“Is there a way to stop them?”
The old woman stared at him, still breathing heavily, her eye never wavering from his. “I think maybe some can be saved.”
“How?”
She waved her hand at him again, closing her eyes. “That’s two questions, and I need to think on them. Bring her down with you, when she’s awake, and by then I’ll have an answer.”
“Why didn’t you say anything—?”
“I was hoping against hope,” she said, the voice of a frightened little girl. “And my crazes weren’t feigned.”
A hundred more questions shuffled in Kel’s mind, but he stood aside to let her pass. “Thank you.”
“No need for thanks. She’s my great-granddaughter, and I love her as much as life itself.” The woman groaned and sighed as she walked slowly down the spiral staircase, careful not to tread on any squeaking floorboards in case she woke her granddaughter sleeping below.
Kel went to Namior’s bedroom window and moved the curtain aside. The ship was still moored in the harbor, though there was no longer a queue of people waiting to board. A few villagers continued digging for survivors. Kel closed his eyes and wished he could un-see the whole scene, but he could not. There’s no one left alive under the mud, he thought. And even if there
is …
It all felt so useless.
One thing the Core had never decided upon was how to fight the invaders, if and when they came. There were plans and ideas, theories and schemes, but all of them involved magic, the one constant in the land that could always be relied upon.
But not there. Even if the Core arrived that night, the fight would be a short one.
He thought of the old woman downstairs, and what she had done, and the more he dwelled on it, the more confused he became.
KEL SAT FOR a while in a wooden rocking chair beside Namior’s bed, desperate to do something but not knowing what he could do. As he’d come back into the valley from the stockade, he’d had vague thoughts of initiating some sort of resistance. He hoped his Core training would help him to move around the fishing village unseen, break into homes that might be locked and set traps in which they could capture and kill Komadians and their metal-clad Strangers. It had seemed like a hopeless plan even then, with no real end in sight other than eventual, inevitable capture, and now it seemed foolish to even consider.
At least he’d sent his message. Mygrette had planted the communicator he’d given her, and a message sent double would hopefully be heeded with twice the urgency.
He had no idea how long it would take for the first of the Core to arrive. But the more he thought about the near future, the more certain he became of his course of action. I should be there to meet them. And yes, to warn them about how the language of the land has been stifled. And …
And there was the crystal he’d buried.
He realized he’d been rocking in the chair, his eyelids drooping, and the movement and soft creaking noise inspired a memory: Namior naked before him, turning her back and lowering herself down as he sat in the rocking chair; sinking onto him, lying back, and both of them letting the movement do its work; her groaning, his hand over her mouth to hold in her cry.
Good times, yet even then he’d been concerned about things that had seemed so important at the time.