Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

  “I’ll save you, Namior,” he whispered, leaving the chair and sitting beside her on the bed. He waited there for a while, his tiredness closing in again, and he leaned back against the wall, Namior at his side.

  IMAGES OF THOSE he had killed haunted his light doze; the Stranger on the beach, the Komadian interrogator Lemual, Mell and whatever had taken her body. They were all trying to talk to him, but however hard he listened he could not hear their voices. He was troubled, because he was certain they had something important to say, but all he could hear was a heavy, steady breathing.

  And then he thought of O’Peeria, his other love and another person he had always assumed the guilt for killing. She walked into his dream and swept the other faces aside in that rough, confident manner she’d had. He held his breath, hoping he would hear her when she spoke, but she had nothing to say. She just smiled.

  Then she looked down, and when Kel opened his eyes and followed her gaze, he saw Namior. Her eyes were open and she was watching him. “Breathe,” she said softly, answering her own dream. “Breathe.”

  O’Peeria was gone but Namior was there, and Kel slid from the bed so that he could kneel down and press his face to hers.

  “Am I awake?” she asked, and he laughed because he was wondering the same thing. He kissed her and held her face, looking into her eyes and reveling in her smile.

  “How do you feel?”

  She was looking around the room as if it was a strange place. “Don’t remember getting back here.”

  “What’s the last thing you do remember?”

  “The boat. You, rowing. We passed a ship with no lights, then … nothing. I was dying.”

  “You might have been. I was terrified that you were.”

  She went to sit up, cringing against the pain that threatened to burst across her chest. Her shirt fell open and she looked down, gasping.

  “Where… ?”

  “Your great-grandmother healed you.”

  “The magic’s back?”

  “No.” Kel sat beside her on the bed, desperate to retain physical contact now that she was with him again. “She’s quite an incredible old woman, isn’t she?”

  “She is,” Namior nodded. “But her craze?”

  “There’s lots to tell,” Kel said. “And after that, there’s something we have to do.”

  “Warn everyone!”

  He shook his head sadly. “Too late for that. The Komadians are already gathering people and ferrying them out to the island. Some of them … some have even been sent back.”

  “Who?”

  Kel shook his head again. I can’t tell her yet. Not Mell, not what I did …

  “I’m hungry,” Namior said, seeing his discomfort. “And thirsty. But apart from that I feel… well.” She propped herself on one elbow, stretched, ran her other hand between her breasts. “Do I look well?”

  Kel smiled and stared at her chest. “Don’t tempt me.”

  NAMIOR’S GREAT-GRANDMOTHER WAS waiting for them downstairs.

  “I have to go out,” Kel said, catching the old woman’s eye. Namior objected, but he calmed her with a kiss and held her close. “Just for a beat. You and your great-grandmother talk. She’s got something to tell you. And when I come back, we’ve got plenty to plan.”

  “I feel ready to go out there now!” Namior said. “Fight those bastards. Get back at them for Trakis and anyone else they’ve done that to. I’m ready, Kel!”

  “Good,” he said, laughing softly. “We’ll get our chance.”

  He glanced across at the old woman again, and she was trying to offer him a smile. But the prospect of the lie she had to admit, the old deception about to be revealed, turned her smile into something else.

  “I won’t be long,” Kel said.

  “Where are you going?” the old woman asked.

  “To collect something I left behind.” He stepped outside and closed the door behind him before either woman could say anything else.

  Kel stood motionless in the cool night breeze. He breathed in deep and let it out slowly, happy to be out of the dwelling and away from the pressures inside. There was so much history there, and the house was filled with such deceit, that he welcomed the honest darkness. He felt guilty for leaving Namior to discover those truths on her own, but it was a family matter. There was also a sliver of doubt and concern … but much as his strict training went against it, he trusted the old woman. Perhaps the five years since he’d left the Core had almost made him human again.

  He remained in the house’s shadow for a few beats, listening, scanning the darkness, sniffing the air for anything strange. There were voices in the distance—one calling the name of a lost loved one, the other laughing—but he could hear no one nearby. Three rats ran along the narrow path, pausing to sniff at his feet before sauntering on their way. Kel was certain he was alone.

  He moved cautiously but quickly, down to the main path and west toward the sea. In places he could see between buildings and across to the harbor. He scanned quickly, looking for the metal-clad Strangers, but he saw none there. It seemed that they were still keeping to the shadows and extremes, and for a while that was a good thing. He hoped it meant that they had yet to reveal themselves to the village as a whole. While the Komadians could still transport residents to the island of their own free will, things would go slowly and peacefully. And while Kel hated the idea of people willingly going to their doom without a fight, it made time for the Core to arrive.

  But they would soon find the bodies of those he had killed. Time was short.

  As he moved, it felt as if the village had been divided into two areas: the harbor, where nothing untoward seemed to be happening; and elsewhere, in the dark, where Noreelans called for their missing loved ones, Strangers prowled and the village militia lay dead. He was in the most dangerous part.

  Kel reached the last of the undamaged buildings and started clambering down over the fallen walls. When he reached the place where he’d buried the crystal, he paused for a few beats and looked around. The sea hushed onto the broken shore. Waves broke around the ruins. The boat he and Namior had arrived in was still there, beached on a shelf of stone. Something called in the night, a sea doon floating somewhere above the waves and seeking a mate, or prey. But no shadows moved where they should not. Kel was alone.

  He started digging. The muck and debris he’d piled in on top of the crystal came out easily, and he was soon making his way back up the broken slope, a bulky shape beneath one arm. Though his jacket was still wrapped around the crystal, he could feel a vague warmth bleeding through, like the sad heat leaving a just-killed body. But he guessed that its warmth would go on and on.

  What he carried in his hands could be priceless. Whatever happened here at Pavmouth Breaks, the crystal would help the Core to understand so much more about the Komadians, their nature and intent. Whether or not they saved some or most of the village’s inhabitants—and Kel was determined to do his very best to help as many as he could—he knew that the crystal had to reach the Core. It would be taken away and hidden deep, where no one could find it. And the Core had its witches. They would learn its secrets, and the secrets of the thing trapped inside.

  Several times Kel almost dropped the object, so sickened was he by what he carried. One of them. One of Noreela’s greatest enemies, and he was taking it back to the house of the woman he loved.

  But in that house lived another of Noreela’s enemies, now, perhaps, its friend.

  Back through the streets, Kel paused at every twist and turn of the path, afraid of what he would find around the next corner. There were more rats, and a couple of wild-looking dogs that had muzzles blackened with dried blood. They both growled at him, but he growled back, and they scampered off into the night.

  Close to Namior’s home, a shadow came at him from the darkness.

  “Kel Boon!”

  Kel took several steps back and drew his sword.

  “Kel Boon, it’s your Chief Eildan.” He gave the nam
e grace and import, but his voice was tinged with fear.

  “You’re alone?” Kel asked.

  “Alone, yes. And you?”

  Kel nodded.

  “There are things in the village,” Eildan said. He still carried his harpoon, knuckles white where he gripped it hard. “From the sea, from the island, things come to kill. I saw my militia, many of them, dead in a hole upriver!”

  “Pavmouth Breaks is in great danger,” Kel said, remembering the Chief welcoming Keera Kashoomie unquestioningly and with open arms. “They’re not what they tell us.”

  “I don’t know where my wife has gone,” Eildan said, a sob belying his previous strength.

  “They’re taking people to the island. And those who try to escape are corralled into stockades up on the plains.”

  “Stockades?”

  “Chief Eildan, we need to be ready to move,” Kel said. “Help is coming, but in the meantime we have to help ourselves. Fight when we have to, move when we can, and do our best to leave the village and get out of the valley.”

  “Leave? Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “Believe me, we’ve got no—”

  “What have you got there?” The Chief had noticed the bundle beneath Kel’s arm, and he stepped closer to see. He was pale and terrified, and it looked as if he had not eaten or drunk anything since the waves.

  “Weapons,” Kel said. “We need to go house to house, Chief, and tell people to prepare. The Komadians are not here to help us, they’re here to …” To what? What could he tell the proud, ignorant Chief Eildan that would make him believe?

  “To what?”

  “Invade,” Kel said. “Form a beachhead.”

  “And help is on its way?”

  “I hope so.”

  “How do you—”

  “Chief,” Kel said, “I have to go. Many more homes to visit.” Eildan was not used to being interrupted, and he stood up straight, ready to berate.

  Kel walked past him and continued along the path.

  “Kel Boon?” the Chief called after him, his voice suddenly very small.

  Kel turned around.

  “Have you seen my wife?”

  “No, Chief,” Kel said. “Maybe she’s already made it out.” He turned and walked away before he could see the hope in Eildan’s eyes turn to doubt.

  Chapter Twelve

  old lies

  NAMIOR WAS STANDING outside her house when Kel returned. She saw him emerge from the shadows with the thing still wrapped in his jacket, and a moment of panic seized her. I’ve been cured by magic from that place, so does that make me closer to whatever he carries?

  Kel paused before her, and she could tell that he was holding his breath. He looked exhausted and afraid, but his main concern right then was her.

  “She told me,” Namior said.

  “And?”

  “And I came out here to wait for you.”

  “Does your mother know?”

  “She says not.” Namior looked down at her hands, clasped before her stomach and twisting together. If she separated them, she was afraid that she’d hit something. So many lies, but she did not know where or how to begin considering them.

  “Namior, she made you better,” Kel said.

  “I know.”

  “She says she feels as Noreelan as any of us.”

  “Yes, I know.” She looked up, feeling a brief and irrational anger at him for trying to defend the woman. She’s lied to us all these years… and maybe her crazes are a result of the pain of lying, rather than old age.

  “She’s going to help us, then we can—”

  “I don’t care, Kel.” And she truly did not. The waves, the floods, the deaths, the island, the Stranger Kel had fought and killed, all of them had been terrible and terrifying, and yet when her great-grandmother revealed her secret, Namior’s world had fallen apart. “I’m not Noreelan.”

  “Of course you are!” He came closer, lowering the bundle and resting it on the ground between his feet. He reached for her, but Namior lifted her hands, ready to push him back.

  “I have Komadian blood in my veins,” she said. “You can’t deny that. And you know what we saw out there! Those things, not human.”

  “But she’s human.”

  “No, Kel. She told me about the curse, and the Elders who survived it. Wherever her body might have been taken from, her heart and mind were Komadian, and even her blood’s been turned that way. I don’t see how anything can change that.” She pointed at the thing wrapped in Kel’s jacket. “She was one of those.”

  “Maybe,” Kel said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” She could barely speak, so heavy was the weight of what she had just discovered. And the heft of that knowledge crushed her, because she could not consider telling her mother, exposing her, denying her history. “How can you say that? You’ve lied to me, and now she has too, and what of everyone else? Am I the only one who really knows who I am?” It was foolish, Namior knew that, an overreaction; but many things she had taken for granted were no more. Waiting for Kel, she had been trying to work out what proportion Noreelan she was, and what proportion Komadian. She felt tainted.

  “She says she’s all Noreelan and against the invaders, and I trust her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because once out of her craze, she’s only tried to help. And she cured you.” Kel sighed and came closer, leaning against the wall of the house beside her. “While you were unconscious, I tried to get out of the valley to send a message to the Core. I was caught and … I killed some of them.”

  “Those Strangers?”

  “Some of the others, too.”

  “Who were they?”

  Kel seemed to pause, and she saw his haunted look as he stared up at the starry sky. “Just Komadians,” he said. “So they’ll be looking for me. And if she wasn’t completely on our side, she’d have turned us in by now.”

  “She knows what you did?”

  “Some. But come in with me now. This will be the proof.” Kel lifted the crystal and walked past Namior, reaching for the front door with his other hand.

  “Kel!” Namior said, too loud. “No!” But he had already opened the door, and as he went inside, Namior heard her great-grandmother’s hoarse voice mutter something. And the old woman began to cry.

  YOU HAVE TO wake your mother,” Kel said. “Everyone has to go.”

  Namior stood inside, looking around the room. Her great-grandmother was sitting on a floor cushion, staring wide-eyed at the thing Kel had put uncovered on the floor before her. Its strange colors were muted in the poor light. She was still crying.

  “Namior?” Kel said.

  Her great-grandmother looked up at her. “Do as he says. I know how I can help you, now.”

  “How?” Kel asked.

  The old woman looked at the crystal again. “Where did you find this?”

  “The island, of course,” Namior said.

  “Where on the island?”

  “By the coast,” Kel said. “There were thirty there, maybe more.”

  “You’ll have to draw me a map. Komadia changes.”

  “What do you know?” Namior asked. She could not keep the anger from her voice, and her great-grandmother glanced up a with very old, very sad face. She knows it can never be the same again, Namior thought, and she felt a sudden, intense sense of loss for the love that had changed between them.

  “These things only survive on certain parts of the island. Something about the ground they grow on; something that seeps up from below.” She leaned closer and looked at the crystal, the dark swirls and shapes inside, the dull surface, sharp edges and the glimmer of something deeper. She was shaking as if in pain. “Unknown centuries I was trapped. I knew existence, and the passage of time… like one long craze.” She reached out and almost touched the crystal. “I wonder who this is?”

  “They’re destroying our village,” Namior spat, “stealing our bodies!”

  “Never pity
your enemy,” Kel said, and the old woman glared up at him.

  “I’ll smash it,” Namior said. She darted at Kel and reached for his sword, determined to swipe down at the crystal and break it open, casting out the sick thing trapped inside. But Kel caught her hand and held her, staring at her but talking to the old woman.

  “How do we get it out of the village?” he asked.

  “That?” the woman said, pointing at the crystal. And she shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “You said you could help,” Namior said. She looked at her great-grandmother, and she saw someone else. She remembered old times—myth singing, storytelling, the woman teaching her to cook biscuits and longgrass pie—and she could no longer associate such good feelings with the wretched old woman sitting before her. That unbearable sense of loss hit home again, and she almost went to her. But she did not know whether she would hug, or hit.

  “And I will,” the woman said. And Namior realized that the old woman felt the same sense of loss. “Namior …”

  Namior looked away. She caught Kel’s eye, and he glanced back at the old woman.

  “Yes?” Namior said.

  “Just because I’m from somewhere else, that doesn’t mean I’m not me.”

  Namior fought it hard, but she began to cry. There was a warmth in her chest that could have been left over from her injury, or perhaps it was grief, and she clasped her hands before it.

  “I love you more than you probably believe,” the woman said, “and my deceit has no bearing on that.”

  “Not for you, maybe,” Namior whispered, and it sounded cruel. She looked down at her feet and heard the rustle of clothing.

  When Namior looked up again, her great-grandmother was standing by the door, holding the handle. In her other hand she carried the blue metal box, and a trail of steam issued from it and rose in the dimly lit room.

  The old woman smiled. Namior could feel Kel’s gaze upon her, the heat burning in her chest where her life had been saved. And it was a lifetime of love that helped her smile back.

  With a contented sigh the old woman opened the door and stepped outside. “Join me, Kel Boon,” she said. Then she closed the door gently behind her.