by Tim Lebbon
The wave hit. It was a maelstrom of light and heat, a shock wave that sucked the breath from Namior’s chest, and an explosion that thumped at her ears. Unable to breathe, skin stretching and burning where it was exposed, she rolled over onto her front and pressed her face into the mud.
Breathe, breathe… !
The noise was tremendous, far too loud to make any sense out of, and Namior was not sure where hearing ended and feeling began. The ground rolled beneath her, thudding against her body as though shaking from a series of massive impacts. The air around her grew hot, and when she finally managed to draw a breath, it scorched her mouth and throat dry.
Someone cried out, and Namior wondered where anyone had found the strength.
She heard and felt something coming then, a thing far more powerful than had struck them already. It was preceded by a few beats of relative calm and silence, like a tidal wave drawing water from a harbor before smashing itself against the land.
Namior looked sideways at her mother. The two women smiled and held each other’s hands.
Namior’s last sense was of being lifted from the ground and rolled, pummeled from all sides by pain. And then, for a time, her world ended.
SHE ROSE SLOWLY out of the mists of unconsciousness. Her hearing faded in first, the gentlest sigh of a breeze interrupted by something harsh and demanding, which soon resolved itself into a voice.
“Wake… wake… take your time …”
She sensed the extremes of her body, limbs splayed, stomach pressed against the wet ground. Flexing her arms and legs, there was little real pain. But when she turned her head to look up, fires erupted across her neck and face.
“Slowly,” the voice said.
“Mother?”
The voice did not reply.
“Mother!” Namior rolled onto her side and opened her eyes. A man knelt next to her, his bald head gleaming with sweat, clothing and belts spiked with weapons. He looked intimidating, but his eyes were full of concern.
“You’ve been burned,” the man said. “Lie back. I have some soothing paste.”
Namior ignored him, sitting up through waves of pain and looking around. The scene that greeted her was nowhere she had ever been.
The rain had ceased, but a heavy mist drifted across the plains, blown inland by a gentle breeze from the coast. It carried with it damp hints of an extinguished fire, and even some of the mist itself appeared smeared with soot. The sun was a smudge of yellow high in the sky. Noon, she thought, though it felt like twilight.
People lay all around, most of them tended by others she had never seen.
“Core?” Namior asked.
“Who are you?”
“Namior Feeron, from Pavmouth Breaks.”
“What happened here?”
She shook her head, dizziness turning the flat ground around her. The bald man grabbed her arm gently and leaned her against him, stroking her face and throat with paste-smeared fingers. He muttered beneath his breath as he did so, and Namior recognized the touch of a fellow healer.
“My mother,” Namior said, and already she was filled with dread. Tears threatened, but then she heard her mother’s voice.
“Namior.” She stumbled through a patch of scorched gorse and fell to her knees by Namior’s feet, holding her daughter’s shins and laughing softly. “Namior, I saw you blown away, and I thought …”
Namior dried the tears with a smile, looking at her mother’s injuries with concern. “Please,” she said to the bald Core healer. “My mother first.” The man smiled and nodded.
“Everyone else?” Namior asked.
“Those who were with us are fine, apart from Mygrette. No sign of her.”
“She’s hard to kill.” Namior injected the comment with more hope than she felt. She turned and looked behind her, and gasped at what she saw. Shadowed against the mist, exposed here and there when a breeze parted around them, stood a line of machines. Their metalwork shone damp, and their sharp edges were out of place against the rolling clouds. There must have been thirty that she could see, and probably more she could not, hidden beyond her sight.
“How many of you are there?” she asked.
“Almost a hundred, so far. We arrived an hour ago, found you all here, and found the landscape …” He shook his head. “Trees are uprooted. There are animals everywhere, most dead, some still alive; birds, reptiles, some sheebok and some things I believe are from the sea. Many taller plants have had their higher parts scorched black. The leaves are dead. And the air …”
“It stinks of the sea,” Namior said.
“Not the sea smell I’m used to,” the bald man said, passing his hands across the bridge of Namior’s mother’s nose.
“It’s the smell of beneath the sea,” Namior said. “Rotting plants. Dead things.”
“We sent a scouting party toward the shore,” he said. “They should be back soon.”
“I wonder what they’ll find?” her mother said.
Namior already had an idea of what they’d find: ruins. The skeleton of a village, the shattered shell of a community, inhabited only by wraiths and dead things.
“I wonder if anyone else survived,” her mother continued, her voice soft and almost dreamy.
“I have to see,” Namior said, standing and holding her hand.
“No, you don’t.” But her mother did not try to hold her back, and for that Namior was grateful.
She walked west, through the groups of stunned survivors, seeing faces she recognized and the members of the Core, whom she did not. She thought briefly of U’Nam and the scarred Pelly, and U’Nam saying, This is the Core’s meaning! as if the Shantasi had lived all her life waiting to die. She walked into the drifting mist, and it settled damp and sickly on her face. She rubbed one hand across her throat, wincing, and realizing that she had not let the bald healer finish his work.
It did not matter. There would be time, and the burns were not too severe. At least she could be healed, whereas the rest of Pavmouth Breaks …
She tried not to think on it too much, not yet. Perhaps magic would still avoid the place, but she had a sense of things having moved on. She needed to know where. She had to see, not imagine.
And Kel… her love, her wood-carver, her runaway soldier Kel Boon. It was he she was looking for really, not some old village of stone and timber, vanished people and fading memories. Kel was solid, and she still felt his touch deep inside, his love nestled alongside her soul, an eternal partner.
“Kel!” she called once, and when there was no answer she walked on.
Something large ran past her, casting a jerky shadow through the mist. She heard the wild horse’s hooves thumping the mud as it galloped away in panic. Above her she could hear birds flapping and squealing, and the undergrowth to her left rustled as something emerged. It was a streaked lizard, the scarlet dashes across its flanks blazing bright in fear. It expanded its collar at her, hissed and disappeared to the east.
The creatures of the land were running or flying away, and she walked against the flow.
She met the two Core who had arrived with Mallor and the others. They guarded the crystal on the ground between them, and the ginger man’s face bore a memory of deep shock. She told them of their flight up out of the village, Mallor’s death, and U’Nam and Pelly staying behind to cover their retreat.
“Then there’s hope for them,” the ginger man said.
Instead of answering, Namior nodded down at the crystal, still covered with Kel’s jacket, and asked, “What happened?”
The two men exchanged glances, shuffling nervously from foot to foot. “It screamed,” the ginger man whispered at last. “When the storm came it started, and it only stopped when …”
“When the sky fell apart,” the other man finished for him.
“And now?” Namior asked.
Neither man replied. They glanced away, blinking.
“You haven’t looked,” she said. The ginger man shook his head. And Namior went quick
ly from angry, to sad, to understanding, because she would not have looked either. “Then for now, it’s someone else’s problem. Make sure it gets into the right hands.” She smiled at the men and walked on.
Past the last of the stunned survivors, she met a line of Core soldiers strung along a low ridge in the land. They stopped her, some of them asked her questions, and she cast aside the wonder she felt at their different accents, looks and clothes, telling them that this was her home and she needed to see what had become of it. She mentioned Mallor, and told them that he was dead. They let her go.
She found herself alone, walking through the flowing mist in the direction of the sea. Pausing to insert her ground rod into the wet soil, she closed her eyes and sought the language of the land. But it was only a whisper. And when she delved westward, she shuddered with such a sense of revulsion that she let go of the rod and vomited. She leaned over and held her stomach, heaving the meager contents of her guts and trying to concentrate on the painful burns on her face. Slowly, she started to feel better.
The ground rod would not wipe clean. It was stained.
As she approached the valley, the mist began to clear. Creatures still flitted past, but fewer now, as if they had all left. The cool sea breeze kissed her face, and if she closed her eyes it felt almost normal. She had walked slightly to the south, hoping to be able to see straight down the valley past Helio Bridge and into the top of the village, and perhaps even to the harbor and the island beyond. If the air was still loaded with mist, she would not see that far, but she would go as far as was necessary to …
Namior topped a small rise in the land and stopped. The first thing that registered was the group of eight Core standing twenty paces down the small slope from her. U’Nam was there, and so was Pelly, leaning on U’Nam’s shoulder because her left leg had been shattered at the knee and hung limp, shifting like a decorative chime from a tree’s branch. I can fix that, Namior thought, get her out of here, back beyond where magic is still sick, and I’ll have to find some ceyrat root, and mix a paste of sheebok-liver blood and rantan seeds, but then …
Namior closed her eyes, tried to calm her racing thoughts, breathed deeply, then looked again. All eight Core soldiers were looking down into the valley. None of them moved.
Still misty, that’s why I can’t see, that’s why …
But she was wrong. There was no mist.
And there was no Pavmouth Breaks.
Chapter Fifteen
somewhere else
KEL HAD SPENT many dark moments imagining what it was like to be dead. O’Peeria had once told him a Shantasi saying: The richest time of your existence is when you don’t realize you’re alive. Start thinking about living, and you have to think about death. Since her terrible demise, he had tried to put himself in her place many times.
Perhaps at last he knew.
So much of him hurt that it was easier to concentrate on the parts that did not. Each of his senses felt abused, and none seemed to be working as it should. He tasted sounds, heard textures beneath his prone form and saw the smells of devastation washing over him. He kept his eyes closed for a while, afraid of what he would see of himself were he to open them. Afraid that the ground would be red, and wet with insides.
Something had picked him from his feet and carried him away. It had been the wind and rain, he’d thought, and the lightning spiking down all around him, and the power he’d felt in the ground, so much more than he had ever sensed before. If this was anything like the magic Namior knew… but he had known that was not the case. This was nothing like magic. This was something else entirely.
He moved his fingers, took in a breath, opened his eyes. His senses settled, and he risked turning his head and looking up at the sky. He felt as though he’d fall from the world if he let go, so he dug his fingers into the damp soil.
Mist drifted by him, dancing in swirls and wafts.
The violence of the moment had changed something forever. As yet he did not know what, but he was suddenly desperate to find out. Pain could try to keep him down, but he would forget it eventually, and he could cringe through it to discover the truth.
So he stood and looked around. He was still on the hillside above Pavmouth Breaks. He turned, and behind him through the mist he could just make out the looming shadow of the Komadian construction. No, he thought, that’s all wrong. That shouldn’t still be there. If Namior’s great-grandmother did do something to help …
But if she had initiated what he suspected—if she really had caused Komadia to move on before the Elders had intended—he had no idea of what might be left behind.
Breathing heavily through the pain, ignoring his bloodied clothing and the hollow throb behind his wounded forehead, he started walking away from the structure, and down toward Pavmouth Breaks. It was time to see what was left.
The mist soaked his clothes. He looked at his feet, concentrating on heading downhill. And then the ground disappeared.
AFTER SEEING WHAT had happened, it took Namior a long time to move.
There was little left of Pavmouth Breaks. It had been scooped out of the land, lifted away with the valley and slopes, the riverbed and bridges, the harbor and houses and temples, the paths and streets and everything else that had made it what it was. A hundred steps from where she stood, the plains ended in a sheer drop, and beyond that drop was the exposed flesh of the land itself. Dirt and rock glimmered beneath the cloudy sky, wet and shocked and never meant to be seen. Scurrying things sought shelter across the new landscape; large and small, pale, eyeless and many-legged.
There were a few buildings left clinging to the untouched higher slopes, but they were ruined, shaken to their roots by what had happened to their village. They were never meant to be seen standing alone, and now they stood naked and open to view.
All but two of the tall towers built by the Komadians were gone. A stump of one remained down where the harbor had been, its unfinished top emerging and disappearing again in the raging, boiling sea. And the one they’d seen up on the northern cliffs was just visible where it protruded above the mist, crazed and pocked like some old ruin, not something new.
The sheer immensity of the scar in the land took Namior’s breath away and weakened her knees. She touched her face, drawing a nail across one of the burns and gasping at the pain.
Walking forward, she stood beside U’Nam in the line of Core soldiers. None of them acknowledged her arrival. They were all somewhere else, a very personal, secret place in their minds where something like this could be observed, processed and hidden away, ready to be examined later around camp-fires or in private rooms, a bottle of rotwine in one hand and eyes staring into the darkness. This was something never meant to be seen.
The sea had rushed in to fill the new void on the coast. The valley was so much wider than it had been, and deeper, and the River Pav flowed into a violent inlet, the waters swirling, waves crashing in seemingly random directions as larger surges rode in from the ocean. They smashed against the new shores, the water heavy with muck and filth. Landslides grumbled down the edges of the new depression, taking trees and boulders with them. We should move back, Namior thought, but even her internal voice was weak with shock.
U’Nam was the first of them to speak. “The island’s gone.”
Namior was confused for a few beats. That was no island, that was Pavmouth Breaks, my village, the place where my family and friends lived and—
But then she looked up and out to sea, past the dispersing gloom to where the sun struck its surface through a break in the clouds. And all she could see was water.
“The island’s gone,” she echoed.
“What island?” one of the new Core soldiers said. Namior glanced to the right at U’Nam and Pelly, and they returned her look. Their faces were so blank that she could not help smiling. They smiled back. She snorted. They laughed.
“Madness,” Namior said, but that one word was all she could utter. She held onto U’Nam as the laughter changed
to tears and back again, and the others looked at them as if their minds had also been stolen away.
THEY SAW A Stranger to the south of them. U’Nam shouted some instructions and the Core slipped into a battle formation, but the Stranger was rushing away, metal-clad arms pin-wheeling as it ran headlong down the slope. As it approached the new, jagged cliff where there had been none before, it sped up rather than slowing down. They saw its limbs still thrashing as it tipped over the edge, but it was too far away for them to hear the impact.
“What in the Black was that?” one of the new Core arrivals said.
“A Stranger in armor,” Pelly said, and for some reason she found that funny as well.
The flash of the Stranger’s demise was a weak reflection across the tumultuous valley.
“There might be more,” U’Nam said. “Go back, tell the others to keep watch. They’re hard bastards, but they have a weak spot.” She reached out and touched Namior’s throat. “Here.”
“Look!” Pelly said. She lifted a bloodied arm and pointed back out to sea.
In the raging ocean, where waves were starting to find their directions and levels again, the remains of several ships wallowed. One was mostly sunk, its three masts snapped away and decks awash. A couple more were breaking up, and one pointed its bow and stern at the sky as it went down, broken-backed.
“Good,” U’Nam said.
Namior closed her eyes, because people she knew might have been on those ships. Or people she did not know, but whose faces she would have recognized. Oh, Kel, she thought, and suddenly she wanted to get closer to things, drift over that sudden point where Noreela had been cut into and pulled away, immerse herself in the mud and furious waters of the new junction of land and sea. She knew that was impossible and foolish, but the urge was powerful.
She could not simply turn her back and walk away.