by Greg James
Ianna went back to weeping and struggling. Mistress Ruth wished she could strike her for what she had said in front of Venna.
“Is it true what Ianna said?”
Mistress Ruth turned her eyes to the girl and found herself biting back tears. Venna was far too young to be left to this fate.
“Be strong, and try to hold onto something,” Mistress Ruth said. “Don’t let them take everything away from you.”
“I won’t.”
The doors opened, and three Reavers strode in, swaying and seeming to drift across the floor. They came around behind the chairs and each of the captives gasped as they felt tentacles grasping their shoulders hard. Then, it began: a cold, sticky sensation as the Reavers’ snouts were lowered over the backs of the chairs, enveloping the heads of the three prisoners like translucent hoods. Mistress Ruth breathed in hard, and her mouth filled with a rank jelly.
Then, there was the pain. And there was nothing more to do but grimly hold on. In her mind, Mistress Ruth saw herself scrabbling with her fingertips to clutch some inner ledge, hearing the sucking sounds from the abyss over which she hung.
Fall into that, she thought, and you are gone for good. You can sink in that stuff forever.
Faces—she could see faces, dipping in and out of the dark. They were malformed lumps that might have been people she knew. Sarah. Woran. Jedda. Mikka. Ossen!
... my dear Ossen ...
Doors crashed open and screamed. Windows wept. Walls wailed and trickled with blood and water. Then the words of the Reavers cut through her senses like cosmic lightning.
“We know you are a consort of the Wayfarers. We must be told everything. You must admit to us who they are. We must know the truth of the Flame—all she is and will be.”
The room, the iron chairs, the blinding wet-blue light coming from the Reaver’s flesh over her face. The horrible, glaring ochre eyes nestled in a black-cowled skull.
E’blis!
He could see her. He was watching this through the Mind-Reavers.
Oh, Mother, save me!
Mistress Ruth felt her mouth wrenched open and frothing, foul water being poured down her throat. She was swallowing and gagging on it, her stomach fat and overly full, worse than it had been. The Reaver was tapping into her memory of Mikka’s sick little game, intensifying the sensations, making everything sharper and harder. Her body remembered, with a shiver, the feeling that came next: the goat’s tongue. She felt it touching the soles of her feet, dragging slowly over them, and as she screamed, she felt her fingers lose their grip on that ledge over the abyss in her mind. She fell. She was sucked down into it.
“No one is tough enough. No one is strong enough to resist us. You will speak.”
She was lost.
She saw stars, suns, and burning universes, screaming nebulas, her own body blossoming in a crucified radiance, eager to burst with fire and light. Then, there was whiteness and loss, the dying of thoughts, the dismal spaces where memories had once been. Her eyes were aching with tears as it all bled away, and she breathed what she hoped would be her last breath. Then she awakened to the blackness of a cell, to the same sad walls as the others who had been in those chairs.
What were their names? What is my name?
The questions went on and on forever through the corridors of her mind, finding no answers. None.
Oh, how it hurt, to lose all those years.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The cell was quiet, as were the figures resting upon the bench within it. With milky-white eyes and pinched, shrunken faces, Venna, Ianna and Mistress Ruth stared into a distance only they could see. The only signs of life were the halting breaths they drew from the musty air of the cell.
The cell door opened and the Fellfolk guard stood aside for Mikka and Jedda. Mikka approached each of the Reavers’ victims, took them by the chin and snapped his fingers in their faces before giving each cheek a light slap.
“Completely gone,” he said. “We have everything we need to know from them, and they will be no threat in future.”
“Will ... they ... live?” asked Jedda, her words sounding dry and awkward, as if she were learning how to speak again.
“I should think so,” said Mikka, “as long as I remember to have the guards keep bringing them bread and water.”
Jedda stepped towards Venna and reached out a pale finger to her sister’s cheek. She stroked the tip of her finger up and down it. “Venna ...”
Mikka looked at Jedda and then at Venna. “I will make sure this one is kept alive for you. Never fear.”
Inasmuch as she is alive, Mikka thought, after what the Reavers have done to her mind.
“I would like ... to stay ... for a while,” said Jedda.
Mikka glanced again at her and Venna, then he walked out of the cell and took the Fellfolk guard to one side. “Listen to what is said, if anything, and report it to me.”
Mikka left with his own mind ill at ease at leaving Jedda alone, but he could feel the familiar scratching inside his skull that meant he was being summoned by E’blis.
As it happened, there was nothing for the guard to report to Mikka Wyrlsorn. Jedda stayed in the cell for some time, and the only sound that came from it was a long and forlorn weeping.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Winter settled over Seythe completely, hardening the earth and darkening the skies. The winds became bitter as the rivers and canals of Yrsyllor froze over. Frost crusted the grass in the morning and snow fell in gusts and storms that hid the most unsightly slaughters of the Fallen from view, for a time.
The village was a quiet place with narrow dirt roads, and each house was a thatched cube of mud and clay. Plain on the outside, the houses were decorated inside with crude handmade keepsakes and roughly woven hangings.
Morning market was setting up, and villagers would smell it before they saw it: raw squid, chicken, and rat-meat mingling with frying fish-salt and sugary odours. The stalls of the market buckled under the weight of goods stored upon them. Soon, there would be the sound of many voices chattering, haggling, and laughing. The people of Seythe exuded a strange sense of belonging, of being rooted in this earth. That was why they stayed, despite the threat of His Shadow so close at hand. That was why they continued their everyday lives. They had accepted the war, factored it into their existence without pausing for thought, in the same way that one accepts the weather changing or the death of the seasons. They had once been Molloi, but now they were something different, and they called themselves Cham.
Sarah’s breakfast was a hearty one of baked buttercakes, bacon, and fried fish-eggs, still sizzling and spitting. She guzzled it down without ceremony before walking to the canal side to watch the fishing boats rocking gently on their way. Nets shivered in the waters, staked in place by wooden spears driven deep into the silt.
The Cham had taken her in that night, at the circle of stones. She had thought they were attacking her, but they had only wanted to stop her from screaming and bringing Fellfolk and Phages down on all of them. If the Fellfolk had captured her alone, she would have been tortured to death for the entertainment of a Phage sergeant. She well remembered her last encounter with the iron-clad half-men in Grah’na and shivered at the thought of meeting them again. The Cham had saved her life. There was little else that could show how different they were from the Molloi.
Wandering on, Sarah came to the village square where the Cham’Mara, the village matriarch, was making a sign over a crumpled corpse that had been brought in on a stretcher. The body was a rag doll of torn cloth and meat. Sarah felt the breakfast in her stomach churn over. Another body sacrificed on the altar of war, by the look of things. A cloud passed over the face of the sun, turning the Cham around her into momentary stains of shadow.
Sarah saw him die. His eyes clear as could be. Accused by a Phage that led a Fellfolk patrol. He was unlucky; chosen to be an example. A scapegoat. Facing his executioners, he had the bearing of a proud rebel, even though he was n
ot one. Wanting to face death and look it in the eye. None of his executioners faltered. Fellfolk kill. They don’t pause for conscience. They don’t get upset. They don’t possess hearts capable of missing a beat. The arrow found its mark in his heart. The Cham boy was falling backwards. Sarah felt and saw every slow moment. Life in collapse, ending with a thump in the dust, a gout of dirt, and sand settling in his uncut hair. His eyes bulging. The arrow had hit him harder than he thought it would.
That was his last thought and memory.
Brave dead boy.
A little hero.
When the sun came out again, Sarah saw the flowers: delicate pale petals peeking from the bindings of the dead boy’s belt. Tucked tight in there. A keepsake from a sweetheart. A valentine. No one had ever meant that much to her, not yet. This Cham boy, who would have been thought repulsive and ugly anywhere else, had found the good stuff somewhere in some girl’s heart.
And The Fallen One had brought an end to that future.
Sarah remembered looking into Woran’s possessed eyes, seeing the dead, red glow of the Fallen One there and promising to kill Him.
Maybe I will, she thought, one day. But first, I have to save Mom.
She walked on to the Hut of Remembering.
~ ~ ~
The Cham village, Cham’Rang, was a collection of thatched wattle-and-daub huts all clustered close together like a family around the fishing canals. The Cham were once Molloi, but they knew how the world worked, how its axis spun, and the ever-changing yet ever-constant mood of humans. They knew that they were only a few, and because of what they had once been, they were hated and reviled. None would mourn their deaths under His Shadow. Knowing this, they kept themselves close together and away from the humans of Yrsyllor. Farming their little land, fishing their canals, and carefully breeding their cattle and donkeys. Just enough for food, enough for trade. Familial love was their brightest coin, and none could trade them for a price higher than this. The history of the Cham was spoken, never written down, except for a few rare and precious manuscripts on aged paper so delicate they would dissolve into dust if handled too often.
Sitting cross-legged in his hut, Cham Sinh read the manuscripts, not touching them, letting one of the children trained as his apprentices place a fragment before him so he could peruse it at his leisure. Then another child would come forward and replace the fragment with another. Though Cham Sinh was not so old himself—in human years, he would have been a teenage boy of seventeen—he was as squat and coarse in his appearance as all Cham were, with the blue and red of youth painted into his rough hair.
Sarah entered the hut and made a sign of welcome and greeting to Sinh and the other children. It was a weird feature of the Cham, Sarah thought, that the keepers of their knowledge and wisdom were not the elders of the village but rather the children. They were entrusted with these manuscripts, the most precious things in the village, and not one of them was spoiled or torn by mishandling or clumsiness.
Not as they would be if a young child back home had been given these old pieces of paper to play with, Sarah thought.
The children carried each worn fragment reverentially on the flats of their palms. Their faces were composed and venerate, watching Sinh as he leaned over to read them. They were so watchful of how he treated the sacred writings, even though he was their senior. Sarah’s eyes had hurt from the strain of reading the faded charcoal strokes in the candlelit hut, but the manuscripts could not be taken out into the light; the elements would bleach the paper and wear it away to nothing in a very short time. Sarah came to better understand the Cham as she read their history. How they had saved and preserved the last remnants of the civilisation that had inhabited the cities within the Mountains of Mourning, before the war of the Iron Gods. Their mythology was only hinted at in the texts because it was thought there was too much danger in setting it down in plain words, in making the intangible tangible, the dreamed and imagined into something real. What little she grasped, though, told her that she needed the Cham’s help if she was to go on with her journey. One scrap of preserved parchment read:
There is an isle, far away to the east and then to the south, where we all came from, where the sea speaks softly, no matter the mood of the winds. It is a place where those who walk in this world can meet with the sleeping and the dead. Secrets are writ in the curves of its caverns and its sands often walked upon by the shades of the once-living. We are to be poor in this life because of what came to pass in the halls of stone. We were once dead yet dreaming, and at peace with the other worlds. We left the other worlds through the caves that are the way to dreams of red, blue, yellow, grey, white and blackest night. There are no lights there, for dreams cannot abide the silver of dawn nor the wakeful beauty of any other flame. One day, when we have walked enough in this world, poor and unwanted, we will go back there to the isle, to the crystal caves, to be dead and to dream again. Until that day comes, we must walk alone here and fear others for they may bring into this world a great shadow and then there will be no more dreams, no more life, no more worlds and nothing to come after.
Among the manuscripts were other flaking parchment pieces that were illustrated with finely scratched drawings. Each of the images, when looked at in the dim light of the hut, took on a disturbing character. Seen in the forbidden light of day, Sarah was certain they would not have disturbed her so. One was of two figures: a lean monkish mummy kneeling before another being with the outstretched bones of its hands showing. The other was an insect of some kind, seeming to possess the qualities of a spider, a fly and a centipede, and peering down at the kneeling figure.
Another illustration was of a mound of ugly matter surmounted by a bulbous skull. The body of the beast was an overweight slug with thin, wormy feelers trailing from it. Sarah put the parchment down when the lines appeared to move by themselves.
Must be the candlelight, she thought, the flickering of the flame, that’s all.
The last parchment piece was covered by scrawls. It was a mess, as if the artist had been suddenly possessed by a small, untaught child. Charcoal lines crosshatched smears of worked-in blackness. Small shards were shaped by the blackness—hundreds of them, minute, maybe thousands. Sarah thought they looked like teeth, lots and lots of teeth, small vicious galaxies of them. When she had stared at that piece of parchment for too long, the candle had suddenly gone out and the lightless air of the hut, suddenly dark, was disturbed by rattling, a momentary chattering as brittle and harsh as broken glass falling to the ground. It reminded her of the doll she had seen hanging from that dead tree. Sarah had put the parchment down and had gone outside to catch her breath. The sun had been setting, washing the land with heavy brushstrokes of shadow.
Sarah had not looked at the parchments again since that had happened. Without the Flame, she dared not risk involving herself with any magic. She had been told those parchments bore images of Nightland things. But the manuscript about the island, she had come back to that one again and again, reading and rereading it under Sinh’s direction, hoping to puzzle out a clearer sense of where the island was. It might not have been the same island Mistress Ruth had spoken of, except that Sarah had asked Sinh what it’s name was and he had said it in a halting fashion, clicking the syllables out with his tongue.
K’th’li’li.
As she knelt beside Sinh, Sarah saw something new, something she had not seen before in the Hut of Remembering. Three groups of crude sculpture clustered together in one corner of the hut. Each group was of three figures. The left-hand group were shown to be on their knees: two bowing, one throwing out its minute arms in a servile gesture. The right-hand group were standing facing one another, their arms twisted in gesture, suggesting conversation. The group between the two was the strangest of all. A circle of small stones surrounded the figures, each with a face that was completely blank and featureless, and each with its arms by its sides.
“What are those figures doing?” she asked.
“Rememberi
ng, Talking, and Forgetting. The three things that all the peoples of the world do. The Molloi Forget. Humans only Talk. The Cham Remember. This will change again some day, maybe soon, maybe later,” said Sinh.
Suddenly, from outside, there came a cry.
“Dracken!”
Dashing outside, Sarah saw it come down, streaking through the air, a winged form diving out of the sun’s glare. There was a momentary flash as she saw something leaving it, speeding down towards the village—a fireball. Everyone threw themselves to the ground as the fireball came down, trailing a grey-black streamer, spitting hot sparks. Scrambling into cover, Sarah watched it tear through the air, its cloying smoke sending stinging needles into her throat and eyes. It swept overhead, scooting over the rooftops of the village. Then she heard it finally fall with a whumph of released heat. Scorching tongues, brighter than the morning sun, licked up into the air. It spat another fireball as it departed, and Sarah had to throw herself out of its way.
She had seen one Dracken before, which the Cham’s bowmen had shot down. They were small, stunted Dragons, about the size of an eagle. A failed experiment by the Fallen One, no doubt. Not as dangerous as Malus, but still able to wreak havoc.
Instead of running and screaming from the Dracken attack, the villagers were methodically setting about defeating the blaze the Dracken’s fireballs had started. Men, women, children and the elderly were rushing buckets up from the canals and passing them along waiting lines. The billowing inferno hissed and spat, consuming the water thrown upon it. It was not wasting away or guttering. The skin of those standing too close to the heat began to turn raw and blister. Sarah joined one of the lines. There was nothing she could do with the Flame as long as that damned ring was on her finger, but she could do her best to help these people save their homes.